The big question, the crux of SEO, is “how do I rank high”? And ranking high means first page, if not top five in the SERPs. Usually.

We know (kinda) what must be discovered and measured, but most do-it-yourself SEOs don’t know how to get some of the vital info they need. The most coveted thing in all this would be a “perfect” keyword list. The list of the very best, most-related, and most-effective (in the eyes of Google).

So, barring any pay services out there, let’s assume you have a site for which you need keywords and you are going to set out to get the best keywords and keyword phrases for use in the following parts of your site:

• Written content, visible to visitors
• Meta keywords
• Meta description
• Alt tags
• Title attributes for links
• Category names
• File names
• Folder names
• Subcategory names

You get the idea. So here are the tools…

Google’s Suggest Feature. This will give you words and ideas you may not have thought of. So, if my main term is “search engine optimization”, I type in “search engine” into the search box on Google and wait a second, a list of terms pops up - including “search engine optimization”, “search engine ranking”, “search engine marketing”, and “search engine submission”. Cool! Ideas. So what happens if I want to get more ideas for one of these things…how about typing “search engine o”? Then I will get even more ideas like “search engine optimizer”, “search engine optimization software”, and “search engine optimization tutorial”.

AdWords Keyword Tool. I use this to find related phrases as well, and I love the fact that it shows me search volume. So essentially you could figure out which words are a waste of time, and which words people actually search for. This is why this tool matters so much. Keep in mind this is giving you Google data on these words, not Yahoo or MSN. But you don’t care as much about Yahoo or MSN, either - do ya?

Creative Querying. This is the little-used technique that can flesh out your keyword research more than the average bear’s. One way to do this is to start with a tilde query - to quote Google: “If you want to search not only for your search term but also for its synonyms, place the tilde sign (~) immediately in front of your search term.” Okay, then. Let’s do “~search engine optimization”. I get a load of results. So, checking out the bolded synonyms, I see “searching engine optimization”, “database engine”, “search”, “engine”, etc. as either related or synonymous terms.

Using these three main techniques above, you can build up a powerful, targeted, and Google-relevant keyword list. From there, you can use the list to target your site toward your niche so much better in the eyes of Google.

Good luck, and happy SEOing…

Tags: Google, keyword, list, search engine optimization, seo

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 5:25 am and is filed under Keyword Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.