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Choosing keywords that bring you visitors and sales

Tools for researching your keywords

Hopefully, you've already identified your target audience and established how you want them to find you. Assuming you plan for them to find you through the search engines, your next step is to decide what words you want your audience to use when they search for you.

This means researching keywords to find the best ones to target. If you don't know which ones you want your visitors to use, they won't find you for any. And if you choose the first ones that come to mind, you'll choose the ones all your competitors are using, too.

You want your site to be rich in keywords that are both relevant to your pages and frequently searched. And, you want them to be keywords for which not many competitors have thought of optimizing their pages.

Wordtracker

Finding the most useful keywords

The first place I've always turned to find such keywords is Wordtracker. Wordtracker has a database of 300,000,000 searches done over the past 60 days. It also offers multiple ways to find the most commonly searched keywords related to your site.

Search options let you enter your own list of keywords or have Wordtracker create a list related to one that you start it with. Depending on how comprehensive of a search method you use, you can have hundreds of popular keywords and the number of times they've been searched in as little as five minutes. But there's more.

Getting ahead of your competitors

Once you have a list, you can have Wordtracker run a competition search to find out how many websites appear for each term when someone searches that term on Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and most other major search engines and directories.

The resulting report shows you which keywords are the easiest (in terms of frequency and lack of competition) to rank well in on that search engine. Incredible stuff that makes Wordtracker a must-have tool for anyone who optimizes web pages!

You can take their free trial to get a feel of what the full version can do. Or you can subscribe for a longer period of time.

Wordtracker gives an excellent quick feel for the keywords in a niche.

NicheBOT

For more intensive keyword research, I turn to NicheBOT. NicheBOT has really risen from a small, free keyword tool to being perhaps the leader in the keyword research field.

For one thing, NicheBOT gives you results that come straight from Google. Thus, you get a clear picture of the keyword conditions for your niche on the search engine that is most important for your business' online success.

Another advantage that NicheBOT has is that it actually draws results from Wordtracker and other keyword research tools, so you get a broader picture of your keywords, as well.

And NicheBOT's deep-digging tools are unsurpassed. You can find out keyword trends to whether your keywords are experiencing increasing demand or falling demand. You can find out what related keywords would be helpful to include on your web pages to ensure that Google will find your page relevant for the keywords you target.

And there's lots, lots more valuable info that you can mine out of NicheBOT. I've used Wordtracker since I first started in online marketing, so I have a lot of fondness for it. But I've got to admit that NicheBOT has surpassed it.

You can try NicheBOT out for two weeks for $1, which is a real bargain.

Wordtracker free resources

Wordtracker also offers a free, downloadable list of the top 500 keywords in recent searches. You can check what's hot to see if any of those hot terms are relevant to your site or you can subscribe to their weekly report and receive it every week.

It also offers a free guide to keyword research. This Keyword Research Guide asked nine keyword research experts how they would research the market for a hypothetical new product and share both their process and their results. You can get a lot of good ideas for your own keyword research by checking out this free, downloadable book.

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