Keyword Selection: Maintain Your Focus

You should develop your content by focusing on phrases instead of single keywords. When you do this you will be driving people to your Web site who are looking for precisely what you have to offer and you will be avoiding people who are not looking to buy your product or service. Now if you provide your new visitor with exactly what they want, you have a highly motivated potential customer right on your Web site.

I must stress, do not waste a single second of your time optimizing your Web site for keywords for which no one searches. You must perform keyword research on all of your keywords. Your keyword research is going to provide you with important data that will help you decide which keywords you should target. The two most important factors you want to analyze when choosing keywords are the number of times that term has been searched for and the number of competing Web sites that show up in the search engine results for your keyword.

Finding the number of competing Web sites is fairly simple. Just go to your favorite search engine, type in your keyword and see how many sites are returned in the results. Unfortunately, figuring out what the majority of the people are typing into the search box is not as easy to figure out.

Thankfully there are a number of tools, free and paid, available to aid in keyword research. Let's take a look at those now.....

Keyword Tools - The Keyhole To Free Traffic

Keyword tools allow us to peek into the world of search engine traffic. The greatest benefit keyword tools provide those of us who are searching for the "perfect" keyword is the popularity of the search term. You REALLY need to know if people are searching for the terms you are going to spend a lot of time promoting over the next, oh, three to twelve months (give or take). So how do we go about finding out how many times a keyword has been searched for?

Let's start with some of the free tools available to us. It goes without saying, but the free tools are quite limited compared to some of the more popular paid keyword tools. But hey, it's a cost effective way to tell us what we need to know.