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Finding Keywords

How do you find really great keywords to build your web pages around? No doubt you know the obvious ones, but you need to build as many reference (or "landing") pages as you can, and you need to find more good keywords in order to do that.

Spy on your Competitors!

One good way is to look at your competitors' sites and see what keywords they are using. Here are some ways to spy on them:

Check out their web pages

  1. Go to google.com
  2. In the search box, enter site:www.sitename (where "sitename" is your competitor's site name) and do the search
  3. This will give you a list of all their indexed pages.
  4. Look at some of the pages and see what keywords they are using
  5. You can view the page source (choose Page Source from the View menu in Firefox, for example) and look at their keywords meta tag; although this tag isn't considered all that important as far as search engine optimsation is concerned these days, if they have taken the trouble to add one it will give you a good idea of what keywords they consider to be important.

Use the tools provided by Google Adwords

You don't have to spend any money on an Adwords campaign to use the tools: you can set up an Adwords account and then decide how much you want to spend on your campaign. To sign up for Adwords, go to adwords.google.com and follow the instructions to create an account (if you don't already have one) Create a new Campaign, create an Ad Group, and add some keywords.

On the Keyword summary page you'll find a link for the keyword tool: click on that and you will see the Keyword Tool page:

google keyword tools Enter one or more of your keywords into the text area and click on the Get Keyword Ideas button. For example, I entered "chocolate by mail" and got the following result:

google keyword search results

One of the most useful features of this tool is that it tells you whether people are actually searching on any keyword - for example, I'd have thought that "chocolate by mail order" would be a good keyword, but it doesn't look like anybody has searched on that in the past month.

Use an online keyword tool

A really clever and useful tool is Keyword Spy. It's a keyword research tool that tells you exactly which keywords work and which do not by gaining access to your competitors' keywords. It helps you to pinpoint the keywords that are driving traffic to a particular website and helps to get your creative juices flowing with fresh keyword ideas. Let's look at an example:

Suppose you're promoting a website that sells gourmet chocolates by mail. An obvious - and highly competitive - keyword would be "chocolate by mail" (a Google search on that keyword found about 4.5 million results!). Your chances of getting anywhere with that keyword are pretty slim. So, go into KeywordSpy and enter "chocolate by mail" into the search box. It soon comes back with a list of sites using that keyword:

keyword spy results 1

Interesting ... I would say that one of our main competitors in this list might be Godiva.com. Let's spy on their keywords: click on their name and we get a list of keywords they are using:

keyword results 2

Lots of good ideas here! Why not try it for yourself with some of your keywords?

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