There are two ingredients to a successful website: a cleverly crafted website design and a strong SEO strategy. While an attractive and intuitive site will help to keep customers and prospects on your site, search engine optimization is the tool that will draw these consumers to your page.
Keywords are a critical component of SEO because they are the words that define you. In order to assure that your company is visible to prospects and customers, it’s important to utilize all of the possible words and phrases that consumers might use for Google searches. Unsure of what keywords might work best for you? Here are a few tools to get you started:
- Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Simply type in the subject you’re researching and Google’s keyword tool will suggest keywords and the monthly and annual search volumes for those terms. If you’re running a Pay Per Click campaign, this tool can also provide you with the cost per click.
- Overture (Yahoo!) Keyword Tool – Yahoo’s keyword tool will also help you to predict the amount of traffic certain keywords will bring and lists monthly regional search volumes for the most popular search engines based on Overture search counts for different geographic markets. It also provides links to price estimate tools for Google Adwords.
- Google Rankings Tool – If you’re curious about the strategy of your competitors, use the Google Rankings Tool to check how they rank with certain keywords. You can also use this tool to check your own SEO efforts.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Google algorithm is always changing. While metadata and pagerank might be important one day, both will be irrelevant the next. The one thing that Google will always value is helpful and well written content. Choose your keywords wisely, work on solid inbound and outbound links, and focus on quality content.
Any questions?
Tags: Google Adwords keyword tool, Google Rankings Tool, keywords, search engine optimization, SEO, Yahoo! Overture Tool
