Keywords: The Holy Grail Of SEO

My previous post It’s All About Content generated some inquiries on how to find the best keywords and keyphrases for your business. Fortunately, there are many resources on the web to help you expand your keyword dictionary – and increase your website traffic.
Keywords are useful not only for SEO purposes, but for pay-per-click (PPC) programs too.

Where should you start looking?
I always like to recommend our customers to look into their own marketing materials and see if there are any words or phrases that repeatedly stand out. Another starting point is to try to describe your business to someone else: what words would you use?
Once you have identified your core keywords, you can then use one of the many keyword tools out there to brainstorm more terms you should probably be using.

Keyword Resources

1. Google’s Keyword Tool
This is one of my favourites. The Keyword Tool provides you keywords related to the terms you entered, and allows you to check the local and global volume search (on Google’s search engine only). It also tells you the advertiser competition and expected cost-per-click (CPC) if you decide to use that term on your PPC campaign. This information is also useful if you’re only looking into SEO, since it’s very likely that competitors are using the same keywords for optimization purposes.

2. Trellian’s Keyword Discovery
Trellian’s Keyword Discovery is one of the most popular keyword resources online. Although it’s a paid tool, you can use their free-trial to see how useful it can be for your website. One advantage over Google’s Keyword Tool is that the Keyword Discovery provides you statistics over the keyword usage across all main search engines.

3. Word Tracker
Similar to Trellian’s Keyword Discovery, the Wordtracker gives you a 7-day free-trial to test your keywords and check for more. You need to register your credit card details to access the free-trial.

4. KeywordSpy
This is also one of my favourite tools. The free version lets you ‘spy’ on what your competition is doing, both for organic and paid keywords. You can see how much your competitors are spending on a given keyword a day, how many daily clicks they get on a given term and number of keywords found on their website. KeywordSpy also provides you a ‘time machine’ view, where you can see the evolution of clicks on a specific keyword in time.

5. Keyword Density Checker
SEO Content’s Keyword Density Checker is an easy-to-use, free resource. You just need to enter your URL link to check what keywords you are already using on your website. Combine then this search with one of the other free tools mentioned on this post and you have your keyword dictionary built.

More Keyword Resources:
- Wordze
- SEMrush
- Overture/Yahoo Keyword Selector
- SpyFu
- Keyword Density Tool

Do you know any keyword tools that aren’t feature here?