It's very easy to start optimising and promoting your site willy nilly for the keywords you think it should be top for.

But how do you know whether the keywords you are using are going to do any good at all? You might search for your company website using the word "hairdressing", but what if everyone else is using "hairdresser"? You'll be wasting your time focusing all of your efforts on a word that no-one is using to search for you!

So how do you find out what people ARE searching for? Luckily a few nice people have made it very easy to find out which words are being used.

So here are 4 great tools for finding the best keywords and phrases for your website.

1. Wordtracker
Widely classed as the best tool available, Wordtracker allows you to find out which words and phrases are being searched for countrywide. Starting with just the general theme of your website, it will generate thousands of alternative phrases, as well as telling you how many people have searched for them in the last month. There is a free trial, but when a week's subscription is just $4.80, it's worth splashing out for the paid version, which is far superior.

2. Google Adwords
You have to sign up for Google Adwords to get at this tool, but it's free to sign up and you don't need to run any ads. Setting up an ad and choosing keywords and phrases will show you how many times they have been searched for recently on Google, roughly how many visitors you could expect to receive, and how much it would cost if you DID go ahead with the ads. It will also show you other phrases, relating to those you have chosen.

3. Yahoo's Keyword Calculator
A great tool for finding related keyphrases, in the UK. It shows how many people have searched on particular phrases in the last month. If you have a UK account, you can log in and get details of UK phrases, and approximate costs to advertise with this PPC engine.

4. Good Keywords
An absolutely fantastic piece of free software that will suggest phrases that you can use, based on some initial input from you. Not only will it suggest alternate phrases, but also mis-spellings, a great help in the world of search engine optimisation. You can also export the lists to text files to make things easier for you.

 

© Nikki Pilkington. No content to be reproduced without written approval of the author.

Nikki Pilkington is a SEO and internet marketing expert, and owner of UK based Internet Marketing company NikkiPilkington.com.

More about this Consultant.

Join the conversation