Research Keywords with free SEO tools

Sometimes businesses mistakenly believe that industry jargon and other “professional” terms are the best keywords and keyword phrases to use. The words you use to describe your product may be very different from the words your visitors might use to locate your website. For search engine optimization, common language may sometimes work the best.

Researching the keywords that people search most frequently can help you in various ways. Not only does it allow you to create content that visitors can “connect” with, it will improve the relevancy of people searches in search engines with your website which will ultimately improve your search engine rankings.

There are free tools available to help you perform simple keyword research. Try one of the following tools:

• Yahoo! Overture Keyword Selector Tool
• Wordtracker's Free Keyword Tool
• Google's Free AdWords Keyword Tool

Once you have compiled a list of the keywords you’d like to target, add the terms to the body copy within your web pages. Try to focus on one different keyword per page. If you have some knowledge of HTML, you might try to it to the following places within your site to help improve your search engine rankings.

• The title tag. The title is particularly important and should include your primary keyword.
  
  
• The description meta-tag. Try to use your keyword closer to the beginning of the description;
  
  
• Headings and subheadings. The tags that are used throughout an article should contain keywords.
  
  
• Links on the page. The words used within links tell the search engine what the linked page is about.
  
  
• Alt text. For every image, write an alt attribute tag, good for both accessibility and optimization.

There are paid keyword research tools available that will allow you to see the competitiveness of a term and historical searching data. If you need a more robust keyword research tool, try Keyword Discovery.

Every site is based on specific key phrases that help to identify the main theme of your entire site. By identifying main words that best explain your site, you will help search engines to categorize your site’s subject matter to a long time to come.

Article by Amie Nguyen.  Article from www.jump.com: JumpUp is a free website and community from Intuit that helps new businesses get up and running successfully.