Keywords are the most important factor in submitting your site to search engines. Keywords are the words people type into a search engine, in the hope of finding your site. Choosing the right keywords is vitally important, and should affect your choice of domain name, design and site content.
As people become more sophisticated in their use of search engines, they tend to use keyword phrases, rather than a single keyword. For example "studded dog collars" instead of just "dogs". Many sites specifically target a keyword phrase on each page. You also have more chance of scoring a better ranking for a keyword phrase, rather than a single, popular keyword.
First of all, I would visit these sites to get an initial idea of which keywords are popular. These sites tell you the most popular keywords in the last 24 hours, last month, and last year. Very interesting reading. After visiting these sites, I had numerous ideas for different websites to build.
Hitbrain.com
Top Keywords
SearchIt is a fantastic new free search and keyword tool. It has a heap of search tools built into it: - keyword brainstormer, Adwords suggestor, Overture suggestor, monetization, competitors, and more. Plus they keep updating it when they think of a new tool. The only search tool you should ever need.
My next favourite site is the Overture Suggestion Tool. For example, for this current page I typed in "keywords". Overture returned a list of related keyword phrases, plus how popular they were. I then modified this page to target those keywords, so more people would find this page. Extremely useful.
Then you need to do some keyword analysis to work out which keywords you should use. Some are so popular (eg home business) that you have buckley's chance of getting a top ten ranking for that keyword. So you need to analyse which ones are both popular, and have comparatively less competition. Wordtracker provides a paid service which will analyse keywords in this way. You may have a one-time free trial of their services. So make sure you have used the Overture Suggestion Tool first of all to work out common keywords, and then go over to Wordtracker to analyse the competition for those keywords. I also receive their free weekly report on top keywords.
Of course you could work it out yourself, by doing a search on your chosen keywords, writing down the number of sites returned for each search, expressing it as a percentage, and then comparing the results and choosing the best percentage. It will take quite a lot of time.
A fantastic new tool TheDowser Keyword Research Software was released in mid 2005, that brings together the different forms of keyword research covered above. There is a free version you can download, or upgrade to a full version, that even allows you to sell keyword research as a business. It has the ability to suggest keywords, retrieve link bids, research popularity, calculate KEI, drawing on databases such as Overture, Wordtracker and other PPC engines. Very worthwhile.
The Google Suggestion Tool suggests variations on your chosen keywords.
Goodkeywords (requires a download) also suggests keywords.
Nichebot is an incredibly useful new tool that does keyword analysis for you for the top 15 related phrases for your keyword. It will also analyse the backlinks and Pagerank of the top 15 sites for your keyword. This tool is absolutely priceless.
A similarly useful tool based around Overture results instead of Google, is ResultsGenerator. Great for finding keywords related to your topic, how much people pay for them and how many times they search for them.
The end result of this section is that you should have a list of preferred, achievable, keywords. Now you can start designing your site layout so that you can optimise your site to target one or two keywords per page.
Your goal is to optimise each page of your website, so that each page will be found for different (although related) keywords, hopefully getting a top 50 ranking for each of your chosen keywords.
As a good webmaster/mistress, you will be planning to build rich content-filled pages. To earn money, you may be selling your own products, or have affiliate links to related products.
Many people also earn significant income from displaying Google's Adsense ads on their pages. This allows Google to display related-topic ads that other people have paid for, and you earn a percentage of what those people paid for their ads. Many people therefore search for topics where people pay large amounts to advertise, so they can earn a percentage of those large figures. Free sites listing high-paying keywords include:
Adsense Heaven
ClickHereForIt
For (hopefully) a laugh, see what people are looking for RIGHT NOW. Refreshed every 15 seconds. MetaSpy
Other sites listing popular keywords are: