You Must Know How To Select & Manipulate keywords

Even when you have used the still to be discussed very special keyword assistance software it is important to realize that you can still add a great deal to your list of keywords and their relative importance. However lets just assume for a moment that you cannot afford to buy special keyword software (by the way if you cannot then you should really consider another business since this is one vital ingredient to success). Under these circumstances you will still be able to identify lots of keywords using your own personal capabilities and some free keyword tools available.

Using brainstorming techniques

This technique relies quite simply in listing as many terms that you can think of without doing any evaluation whatsoever at the time of the idea this is done later. The more people involved in the brainstorm the better.

Remember in the brainstorming technique what are called lateral keywords will come up frequently. These can be very important factors in your final choice of targeted keywords. An example of a lateral keyword using soccer as the overall keyword topic could be David Beckham, Manchester United, premier league and so on and so on. Taking this point a bit further you might decide based upon your brainstorming technique to optimise a page for premier league soccers clubs.

Vertical keywords are the more obvious keywords like:

• soccer balls

• soccer boots

• soccer stadium and so on

Combining lateral and vertical keywords can add a great deal of value and provide lots of traffic to your optimised web page.

Using competitors web sites

Many web sites list their keywords in the meta tag section of their web page. It is simplicity itself to explore these until your heart is content. All that is required is to View Source as described earlier go to the Head section and copy and paste the keywords you find there.

If you decide to go this route do the manual brainstorm first so that you are not overly influenced by what you find that your competitor is doing

Using Free keyword search tools

Overture is a pay per click search engine. This means companies actually agree to pay Overture if someone clicks on the SERP return corresponding to the selected keyword. Overture publishes a list of search terms used by Overture searchers. The link will be provided to this tool in the appendix. In also ranks the list from most searched for down to least searched for and includes generated search terms. This is the Overture keyword suggestion tool and it could be a good time to look at it and give it a try. It will help you to understand a lot of what is coming. http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

In the example below we used the generic word ponds to see what came up. The numbers indicate how many times the words pond or ponds was searched for on Overture during December 2002. Note the other terms containing pond(s) and the search frequency. This is useful information.

There are some major drawbacks in using Overture. The terms include both singular and plural terms and there is no indication of number of competitors although this can be done manually. The results are also only drawn from the Overture database which is not a popular search engine for general search purposes. because it's free everubody has access to the same information. The real challenge is to find information most people don't know about. There is a rumour going the rounds that Overture intend to remove this tool so that it is only available to customers in future. Despite the drawbacks Overture can be a very useful means of adding keywords to your manually derived list. Overture UK provides a different keyword suggestion list to the one from the USA database. See below for the search for ponds and compare with that previously shown.

Try vivisimo.com for an excellent source for related keywords

How to add more keywords to your keyword list