Website SEO – How to Find Keywords For Your Site

Keywords are the kingpin of your SEO effort.  Without some SEO your site will be wonderful but not found (no visitors).  So you should start with finding keywords preferably before your build your site.

How To Find Keywords

Probably the best place to start is will be Google.  Use some search terms that find similar sites to the one you want to build.  Once you have 5 to 10 search terms that work for your niche it is time to find more keywords.

Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  Enter each of your search terms (one at a time) into the tool and see what results your get.  Change the results to exact match and export the results in a .cvs file for excel.  Repeat this for each of your search terms.

Now open them all into a spreadsheet (I use open office).  Place them all on the same sheet and sort by keyword.  This will allow you to delete any duplicates..

Refine Your Results

What i like to do next is sort them by the Global Monthly Search Volume.  Then I find keywords and keyword phrases that have a search volume between 1,000 and 50,000 per month.

Now I want to find out how difficult it will be to get on the first page of Google for each of these terms.  So I look at the top 10 sites for searches of each keyword and want to know their page rank and number of back links.  (Two indications of authority)  The lower the page rank, the lower the number of back links and the lower the number of competitive pages for an exact match the better for me.

This can take a lot of time and effort.  But luckily there is a tool the makes is much easier to gather the data.  I use WebComp Analyst.  I only find this data for 3 or more word phrases.  I use the shorter phrases as secondary keywords.

Reach Conclusions

You have all the data.  Now look for the best 3 or more keyword phrases to use.  These are the ones with the lowest competitive pages, lowest average page rank and lowest average back links.

Use these keyword phrases in your URL, page and post titles, meta tags and in the content.