Keywords and keyword phrases are just as important as they once were. Keywords help the search engines to work out what your website/blog/twitter feed are all about and they use this information to match you to the search queries that their customers are making.  They should be one of the most important elements of your search engine optimisation.

There are various ways to find the best keywords for you. The most important thing when you are first looking is to test everything.

Objective
What is your current business objective? This is the most important question. And your keyword search is based on the answers to this question.

Overall, what are you trying to do? Inform people, get more contacts, get more visitors, make more sales? You may have several business objectives and this may lead to the development of several lists of keywords, each one targeted at a different objective. Once you are clear you can then start to find your best keywords for the job/s in hand.

Brainstorm
Along with your team, friends and even customers, brainstorm what you think would be best keywords for your business and its objectives.

Competitors
What keywords are your competitors with better search engine rankings using?

Keyword Research tools
Armed with your list of keywords the next thing to do is to test them with well known keyword research tools:

• Google Keyword Tool
• Google Insights & Trends
• Google Trends
• SEMRush.com
• Keyword Discovery
• WordTracker

These tools enable to track trends and assess the viability of your chosen keywords.  The Google tools are free and the others have both free and paid tools that you can access via their sites.

Professional Help
Keyword research is both an art and a science. Going it alone is time consuming but can be done. However because choosing the right keywords is a pivotal part of your online marketing it is important to get it right. Professional help will save you time and costly mistages.

Tags: keyword phrases, Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.