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Who's Googling What:
5 Tips for Do-It-Yourself Keyword Research

dog diggingEver wonder if the keywords you picked to use on your website's home page are the ones that people are googling when they are looking for your product or service?

There are specialists out there whose whole reason to be is to optimize your site, to be sure you show up in the search engines. But until you can afford that kind of help, or even as a nice experiment before you hire that SEO specialist, there are some things you can do right now to check on the effectiveness of your keywords.

This is not meant to take the place of a professionals' services, but it can be an eye opener. Because, you may think you know what terms prospective customers are using to find you, but can you really be sure?

In addition to SEO (search engine optimization), the right keywords will get you better results from your pay-per-click ads and can help you decide if that new online product you are thinking about launching will be a hit.

5 Tips for Do-It-Yourself Keyword Research

1. Make a list of keywords you currently use on your home page. Include the words or phrases that were your top keywords (or that you thought were) when you wrote your website copy. Keep this list handy as you move on to the next steps.

2. Use a keyword research tool to see if people are searching for your content. One useful (and free) tool is Spacky.com. You can enter a keyword and get the number of searches that were made in the last month using that particular term on three different search engines: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Network. Spacky.com also gives you a detailed list of related keywords and the number of hits they got. What's an acceptable number? The famed copywriter Bob Bly uses 100,000 Google searches a month as a measure of whether a keyword will be successful online.  

3. Pay attention to small variation in keywords. For example, if you train corporate leaders, you might have included "executive coach" as a keyword on your home page. And that's good. But your spacky.com research shows you that, while 27,100 people searched Google using "executive coach" last month, more than double that number-74,000-used the term "executive coaching." What a difference a three-letter change makes.

4. Find out what keywords some of your strongest competitors are using. You can do this by reading the source codes (the programming language) on their websites. The source codes you are looking for are the keyword lists called meta tags. The key ones to look at are the title tags, the description tag and the keywords tag. On the home page, click on "view" and select "source." A window then appears where you can see the meta tags displayed as title, description and keywords.

5. Compare the findings to your own keywords. Are you way off base with the keywords you currently are using? Did you find some new ones to use? Did any of the keyword search results surprise you?

Of course, this can't replace more comprehensive work to make sure you have the best SEO strategy in place. For that, see someone like Brent Haeseker at Netsource Technologies.

But this is a start. 
© Marketing Hotspots - Cat's Eye Marketing 2009 - Vol. 2, Issue 41

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