Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

Choosing the best keywords to optimize your site can be a challenge but I am going to show you the best ways to find the keywords that will get your results. This is a very important step in Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click Campaigns.

I am surprised the number of times that customers ask to be listed as number 1 for their business name. I explain to the customers that they will normally rank at the top for their business name. If people are entering their business name, they are only searching for their website.

Looking from a customer perspective
One of the main problems people don’t realise when choosing keywords is that they choose keywords that are either industry jargon or something that only an industry insider would search for. You want to choose keywords that potential customers would use to do a search, afterall, it is not you that is going to be doing the searching.

Check out the competition
You can easily check what keywords your competitors are using. Visit their website and click on Tools -> View Source. You should be able to find the META data which will have a list of keywords and description. Have a look at the list and see what keywords would be good to optimize your site for.

Here are some tools that will help you evaluate what keywords your competitors are chasing. These tools offer a free trial but they are paid services.

• compete.com
• keycompete.com
• seodigger.com
• keywordtracker.com
• keyworddiscovery.com

Keyword suggestion tools
Here are some free keyword suggestion tools based on past search queries to major search engines

• Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool
• Free Keywords Tool from Word Tracker
• Free Keywords Suggestion Tool from Keyword Discovery
• Free Keyword Tool from Word Stream

These tools allow you to enter in your website, you competitors’ websites and industry keywords (to generate non-industry keywords).

Sorting out your keywords
You probably have a lot of keywords in your list now. Put them into a spreadsheet program like Excel to help sort them out. Remove duplicates and unrelated keywords.

You should now have a list of the best and profitable keywords ready to enter into your website or marketing campaigns. Make sure you keep this list private and in a safe spot. We will come back to this list of keywords later and analysis how your website is currently ranking for all these keywords but I will save that for another post.

Let me know if this has helped you with generating the best keywords below.