Improve search engine placement with keywords

If you want to improve search engine placement for your pages, then you need to know what keywords are!

Here's a basic guide for those of you who have never met this term before.

What are keywords?

• recipes
• weather
• or insects

and others are a little more specific:

• bread recipes
• Seattle weather
• or insect stings

Sometimes people are searching for very precise information:

• bread recipes made without yeast
• weather records from 1890
• ... or the biggest insect in the world

What have you searched for lately?
Well, whatever you typed in to that box at Google or Yahoo was a keyword.

As you can see, a keyword can be one word, two words - or a longer phrase of three, four or five words, for example. The whole phrase is called a keyword. So this is a very general keyword:

• gardening

- and this is a much more specific keyword:

• how to design a garden pond

Think about what keywords your visitors are searching for

You can probably guess some of them.

Why not write your own list of all the words and phrases that you think people might be searching for?

They'll be looking for

• advice
• how-tos
• guides
• reviews

- and using phrases that are all about your particular topic.

They'll also be looking for very specific product info

People searching for a washing maching might just search for "washing machine." Then they'll start looking for particular brands. Then they'll be plugging in brand and model numbers for their machine to find reviews, prices and so on.

All the phrases you can think of will give you a nice long list of keywords.

But to get reliable data, you'll want to use some keyword research tools that will give you a much fuller, more reliable picture.

How can you find keywords?

You can find out what your potential visitors are looking for - and deliver that information to them through the pages of your site.

I recommend you start with these free keyword research tools - the classic tools at the top of the list should start you off on the right foot.

What keyword tools tell you

Using keywords for your site helps improve search engine placement for your pages. And when you get going with the tools, you'll be wanting to find out about:

• keyword demand
  - is anyone looking for the information you're giving?
• keyword supply
  - are there billions of pages about that topic already on the Internet? (this is your competition)
• keyword viability
  - are there any keywords within your site's topic that could attract good traffic? Some tools will do all the complicated math for you and tell you what looks good and what doesn't.