What is a Keyword ?
The basic definition of a keyword, is a word or phrase, that is typed into the search box in your browser.
The Search Engine then decides, based on the keyword that you have entered, the most relevant information, and displays it on the results page.
The reason that keywords are so critical is, that you want your page to be in the top results in order for anyone to find it.
The keywords that you use tell Google, and the other search engines what your page is about.
Keyword research is not something to be done once when building a website , and then forgotten, it should be a something that you do regularly.
You need be constantly analyzing what keywords are working for you and which aren’t. Focus on your good keywords, get rid of the bad ones and keep looking for new ones.
If you aren’t constantly doing keyword research, your competition sure is. Some of the big guys have hundreds, even thousands of keywords.
You are writing articles anyway, you might as well optimize them when you do it.
While social media, is great for spreading the word about your site, what would happen if you stopped ?
Keyword research is one of the ways to optimize your website, to get free traffic from the search engines. That traffic won’t stop if you keep on doing , and improving your on site optimization.
Large companies pay unbelievable amounts of money to have good ranking in the search engines, but you can do it for free, with good keyword research, and some other simple methods for increasing your rankings.
So where do you start, well there is a saying out there that you write for people not search engines. In truth you can do both. A good idea when first thinking about what keywords to use is to think of what words you type into the search box.
If your site was selling Yoga clothes, and Yoga accessories. You need to think of a lot of keywords that you think people will search for. Yoga clothes probably has a lot of competition, but you still want to use it, so you will start to rank for that keyword.
How about Yoga clothes for kids, men,women . Yoga mats, yoga mat bags, yoga rugs, yoga pants, yoga apparel.
Use some qualifiers, plus sizes, cheap, hot, organic, people who do yoga are probably interested in being green, or some brand names.
I hope you are starting to get the idea, and am going to stop now, so I don’t start ranking for yoga clothes. LOL
You still need to use your main keywords, but will have a better chance of ranking for the longer ones. They are known as Long Tail Keywords, or as some people call them, the low hanging fruit. That’s another post 
Keyword Tools
Ok, so now you have your preliminary list of keywords, you now need to find some more.
Lets go to Google Adwords External Keyword Tool
Put your keyword into the searchbox, and hit search Google will then find you a list of keywords that relate to the one that you entered.
A lot of people will stop here grab the keywords with the most traffic and start popping them in their website. This is a really bad plan, and is doomed to fail. You need to do some further research.
In this image you can refine your search by country, filtering out keywords, and adjusting the monthly searches.
You now have what I hope is a long list of keywords, so what do you do with them now ? More research !!
Don’t worry it’s easy.
There is a really cool free keyword tool put out by Mark Ling of Affilorama, and its called Traffic Travis.
Not only can you do keyword research there is also , Search Engine Tools, Page Analysis, SEO Analysis, PPC Analysis, and Keyword Tools all for free.
Simply put your keyword into the search box, and Traffic Travis will pull information from the internet telling you how tough the competition will be for a certain keyword, or keyword phrase, what the page rank is, how well the site is optimized, for the first 20 websites that rank for that keyword. Cool eh !
Before each module there is a detailed video explaining how it works, so I won’t go into anymore detail.
Download Traffic Travis
One more Free Keyword Tool.
Keyword Eye
Enter the keyword.
Red is a high competition keyword, orange medium, green low.
I have rushed over the last part on purpose. I wanted to show the tools, so you could see how easy basic keyword research can be, but am going to go into more detail in my next post.
There is a lot more to keywords, and keyword research, but this should give you a basic understanding.
In my next post I will go into more detail on these keyword tools, competition on a keyword, is it worth going after a keyword, and more.
I have put a few links below of some great resourses.
A tutorial on keywords Word Tracker- Keyword Basics there is a product for sale here, but you can just read the tut’s
Google Webmaster Tools The Google Bot if you have a website and don’t have Google Webmaster Tools you really, really need to get it !!
Googles Matt Cutts on Keyword Research Youtube videos.
Learn from other website owners at Google Webmaster Central Forums
Please leave your comments, Tweet and share if you liked this post.
This is an addition to my original post. I use Market Samurai for keyword research, and was hesitant about mentioning it because I am an affiliate. A couple of the commentors have mentioned it so I have added my affiliate link.
The videos on keywords are excellent, and 100% FREE. There is also a free trial offer.
Thanks
Neil
