Choosing Keywords
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I’ve mentioned the importance of good keywords/keyphrases in previous articles, but I’ve never told you how to choose them. So today, I’ll get back to basics, and I’ll introduce you some of the tools I use to find search terms (keyphrases) for my websites.
You can then use these keyphrases to help you select a domain name, a website name and also to fill in your meta description and keywords.
What are keywords/keyphrases?
Keywords are words that represent the content of your website, and are also the words one would use in a search engine to find your website. Keyphrases are just a series of keywords or a “phrase”. Keyphrases are also known as “search terms”.
How do you choose keywords and keyphrases?
I’ll give you an example. Your website might be about car hire:
So your keywords could be cheap, affordable, budget, car, hire. Then from this, you workout search terms people might use to find your site.
For example: car hire, hire a car, cheap car hire, affordable car hire.
Note: Stopwords are words like a, the, for, who, how. These words are ignored by search engines (unless they are the only words in a search query) and so should be left out of your keyphrases.
Also Note: You can repeat your keywords in different keyphrases, as long as the keyphrases are different from each other. But you want to keep you keyphrases to 10 or less.
The difficult bit – competitors!
It all well and good to have you keyphrases popular and relevant your website does, but what about your competitors? If there are hundreds of websites that are doing exactly the same things as you, using exactly the same keywords and keyphrases, you’re going to have a really tough time getting on the first page of results on any search (and if you want decent exposure, that needs to be your goal).
This is where you need to do your research, (you should probably do this before you buy the domain and start the business 
). You can find out how popular your keyphrases are (which is good, it means lots of people search for this) and how many websites there are using these keyphrases with some of the handy keyword tools at the bottom of the page.
If you have a really popular idea (and you have many competitors), you may need to try something slightly different or go for a less popular keyphrase, but with less competition; a niche market.
Change is good!
You may find your keywords aren’t getting you the hits you want. If this is the case change them! You may need to change your keywords and other aspects of your website often to stay on top of the competition.
Remember, there are always new websites starting, and established websites employing the same SEO techniques you are. So you need to be competitive, always!
Now for the Keyword Tools:
This is probably a good tool to start with. You enter a “topic” (the main keyphrase for your website) and it will give you a list of related keyphrases.
For example, I entered “car hire” and it gave me a whole heap of obvious keyphrases that I didn’t even think of: car rental, rental car, air conditioning, etc, etc.
This tool is actually designed to research keyphrases to use if you start an adverting campaign using Google AdWords. But it will accurately tell you how many times per month the keyphrases you enter are searched on Google.
It also gives you some suggested related keywords and keyphrases and it tells you the advertiser competition, which will give you a rough idea of how many other sites are using these keyphrases.
Simply do a Google Search
Type your keyphrases into a Google search and see how many results are returned. This will give you a decent idea of how many websites (well, webpages really) you’ll be competing with.
By combining these tools, you should hopefully be able to find some good keyphrase for your website. Remember, SEO isn’t an easy game. You need to stay on the ball; keep refining and improving your keywords and keyphrases, just like the actual content on your website.
Good Luck!
About the Author: Andrew McGrath
Original Link: Choosing Your Keywords.
You can check out My Life Story on my blog.
