The most common question I get asked whenever I’m at a search engine workshop is “How do I find keywords for my website?”

The first thing you need to do is try and get inside the mind of your target market and think about the keywords they might use when performing a search on the internet. Lots of people I speak to think their website needs to rank for very high-level terms such as ‘weddings’, ‘cars’ or ‘TV’, when in fact this will drive a lot of traffic to your website but it will be mostly untargeted traffic. These people will most likely not find what they are looking for and as a result will not convert into customers, subscribers, readers etc.

The trick to keyword research is to find and use keywords and keyword phrases on your website that complement your service or product. For example, if you sell LG refrigerators in Landsville, ranking number one for the term ‘LG’ won’t get you the traffic that you want. More likely you will get people who are searching for the official LG website, and not people who are looking for your product or service.

On the other hand, if you rank number one for the term ‘LG refrigerators in Landsville’ you are likely to get less traffic, but your traffic will be more targeted to your product or service and these types of visitors are more likely to purchase from you.

Now that you have a general idea of the types of keywords and keyword phrases you should be using on your website, how do you go about finding them?

Keyword Tools
One very effective way of finding out potential keywords for your website is to use a keyword tool. Here’s two of the most commonly used keyword tools available on the internet free of charge:-

Overture
You can type a keyword or keyword phrase into Overture and it will provide results that are related to this keyword term along with how many times that keyword phrase has been searched for.

Google Keyword Tool
Google’s keyword tool works almost the same as the Overture tool outline above, except they don’t provide numbers of how many times a keyword has been searched for.

Competitors’ Websites
If you go to your competitors’ websites you can find out what keywords they are using and are having success with. You can analyse the content on their web pages, looking at the meta keyword and meta description tags. This is a great way of finding out the keywords they are using on their website.

Finding keywords in the meta keywords tag and meta description tag
When you’re at a competitors’ website, you’ll need to look at the code of the page you are on. To do this simply click View/Source and you’ll see the source code for that page. Most people won’t understand this code and will appear as if it’s written in a foreign language, but there’s one section in the code that will reveal all the keywords a competitor is using on their page.

What you will be looking for is a piece of code that looks like this:
<metaname= “keywords “content” keywords will be in this section of the tag”>

To find this press Control F on your keyboard – this is the shortcut for Find, and type ‘keywords’ into the box. The same applies for the meta description tag – search for the word ‘description’ within the code.

Statistics
A statistics program is another useful tool in finding out keywords people are using to find you in a search engine. There are plenty of free analytics programs available – one of these is Google Analytics.

Log internal search data
If you have a search box contained within your website, then you can log all terms that are searched for in this box. A great way to find out what people are looking for during their visit to your website.

Get people you know to search for your product or service
Ask your friends and family to search for your product or service in a search engine they use, and ask them to take note of all keywords they use whilst trying to search for your product or service.

This should be a good starting point for you to find keywords for your website.