How to Use Keyword Suggestion Tools Part 1
How to Use the Keyword Suggestion Tools: Part 1 of 2
It is a good idea to visit the keyword tools described in my last post “Keywords: Using Keyword Suggestion Tools for Article Marketing and Websites” to familiarize yourself with how they work before you decide to use them for your articles or web pages.
Go to one of the tools, then try typing a word into the suggestion box and see how many results come up. If you are using WordTracker than try variations of that phrase to see if the results change (if you are using the Google Adwords Keywords tool, variations of your search will also come up).
Remember that when you are comparing the results from the two keyword suggestion tools, Google Adwords gives the amount of searches for a month, whereas Wordtracker gives the results per day. Aside from this difference, each tool draws upon different statistical bases, so the scores do not actually correlate, except vaguely.
This suggests that you should use these tools creatively rather than rigidly. As a related example of ‘creative use’, you would be better to use the strange keyword phrase “light bulbs energy saving” in the form “energy saving light bulbs”, as this more closely matches real speech and writing, and is probably more likely to produce good search engine rankings even though it may not receive such a high score as the former, ‘strange’ phrase.
Once you are familiar with what you are looking you can start using the keyword suggestion tools specifically for an article, website or blog content.
Start by typing the topic you wish to write about into the search box of one of the keyword suggestion tools and click the search button. The results that come up probably include the keywords you’ll want to include in your article. Make a list of all the possible keyword phrases you could use in your article, taking note of what I said above about the range of searches.
If a keyword has a high number of searches then it is likely (but not always the case) that there will be more competing sites. You can check this by searching for the keyword or keyword phrase in Google’s search engine (as opposed to the Adwords tool) and looking at how many results come up, as these will be the amount of competing web pages you will be vying with for first page ranking.
Other things being equal, it is worth trying to compete with numbers under 500,000, especially if you have a new site. That might sound like a lot of competition, but really it isn’t. A high percentage of that 500,000 will be pages that are not keyword optimized, or are ineffective for other reasons.
Remember that keyword phrases rather than individual words are usually the best to use because the more words that are in the phrase the less competing sites there will be for that word combination and so the more traffic you are likely to get in the end. It is best to use keyword phrases with three to five words in them. If they are too long then less people are likely to be searching for them, and if they are too short the competition will be too strong for your page to rank well.
Keyword phrases as opposed to keywords are also likely to be much more targeted, and what you want for your website is targeted visitors who will interact with your site in the way you want them to (for example, subscribing to your mailing list). People who search at search engines using single words are usually just vaguely surfing around a subject with low motivation to do anything further – just ‘checking it out’.
In my next post I will look at using keyword phrases in the name of your page, its title and content.
© 2009, Mjad. All rights reserved.
Traffic Folder is about helping you to increase traffic to your website, especially if you are on a limited budget or looking for no-cost techniques.
[...] my next post I will look at how to use these keyword suggestion tools in practice, what mistakes to avoid and what advantages there are to be [...]
[...] (Read Keyword Suggestion Tools Part 1 here.) [...]
The website was decisively fantastic! Lots of great information and creativity, both of which we all need!
great post and great reading.
My friend mentioned to me your blog, so I thought I’d come have a read. Very interesting material, will be back for more!