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Finding Good Keyword Phrases

by Neil Moran

Finding good keywords is a never-ending quest, so here's a couple of links and an example on how to use them to find good keyword phrases.

If you're trying to optimize a page for a popular keyword that has alot of competition, take a close look at the related keyword phrases.

Let's say you wanted to optimize your page for the keyword "marketing", which was searched for over 240,000 times on Overture alone in the last month. There are nearly 42,000,000 competing websites on Google; the keyword "marketing" is FAR too general, sure if you got ranked #1 (very doubtful!) you'll get a lot of traffic, but it won't be targeted traffic.

Be more specific, target keyword PHRASES.

Let's try "Internet Marketing" which was searched for nearly 80,000 times on Overture and has 550,000 competing sites on Google, that's far better, not brilliant, but at least you're more targeted now.

Now, under the keywords "Internet Marketing" over at Overture, people also searched using these phrases:

79764 internet marketing
6087 internet marketing online
4635 internet marketing strategy
2733 strategic internet marketing
2603 internet marketing consultant
2384 internet marketing consulting
2378 internet marketing service
2355 internet marketing tool
1929 internet marketing company
1855 internet web site marketing
1631 internet marketing san diego
1429 internet marketing solution
1327 internet marketing research
1183 aggressive internet marketing
1178 internet marketing plan
1165 internet marketing business
1058 internet marketing ebook
1026 internet marketing email

There's a whole lot more but I think you get the picture...

OK, the keywords "marketing", and "marketing online" are obviously going to have their fair share of competition, however, using the tools above point you in the right direction on how you should build your pages and show you the specific keyword phrases people are using and allow you to check the competition for those keywords.

Let's go one step further and see what other keyword phrases we can find from our example, take "internet marketing strategy" for instance, here are the other keyword phrases people used:

622 corporate internet marketing strategy
451 developing internet marketing software strategy
191 hosting and internet marketing strategy
66 internet marketing strategy uk
65 marketing strategy internet strategy
65 internet marketing strategy tactic
55 colorado internet marketing strategy
50 boulder internet marketing strategy
47 vancouver internet marketing strategy
46 ebook internet marketing strategy
33 internet marketing strategy edinburgh
33 internet marketing strategy ireland
31 city internet marketing strategy twin
28 minnesota internet marketing strategy
28 internet marketing strategy plan
27 charlotte internet marketing strategy

Now the above list has really narrowed it down, OK, they're not very popular search terms, however, if you were to weave these phrases into your pages, meta tags and links etc, you will dramatically increase the chances of your webpage getting found than you would if you had just concentrated on the keyword marketing that we originally used in this example on your site.

Here's some links to help you find your phrases:

1) http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

2) http://www.wordtracker.com: At the wordtracker site, click on "trial".

3) http://conversion.7search.com/scripts/advertisertools/keywordsuggestion.aspx

4) http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html: Use ranks.nl to check your keyword density.

Neil has over 7 years of online marketing experience. Discover how he drives quality targeted traffic to his site: http://www.forfreedom.ws.

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