Search Engine Optimization Software, Free SEO software

Thinking like your customers
Thinking like your customers is easier said than done. Part of the problem is actually you, the
website owner. You know your business and market too well. The industry jargons and slang
are in your every day language. No wonder when you start your keyword research you have
a very narrow keyword focus. You become your own worst enemy in exploring other ideas.
Here is an example: when people search for getting their site ranked higher on the search
engines, they may look for anything from "web promotion" to "web ranking," or even "web
traffic." "SEO software" could be the last thing on their mind, but yet we would bet our
business on "SEO software" being the best keyword for our site to target. Here is another
example: what is the most popular search term, "cheap flights," "cheap seats," "low fares" or
"discount fares"? As you can see it's not that simple to pick the best keywords, is it?
The hardest part of keyword research is to keep an open mind about all possible search
methods people might use to look for the same thing. Keyword research is part science, part
intuition, and imagination. Since we can't get into the heads of every possible potential
visitor to your site who may be interested in your products or services, we have to rely on
keyword research tools to tell us what people actually search for and how often. There are a
handful of very powerful keyword research tools that are worth using, but the amount of
information you can mine from them is mind boggling. 
Another great resource for proven keywords is to look at your competitor's website. We are
talking about finding the highest ranking competitors on the search engines using your target
keywords. Once you find the top 5-10 competitor sites, perform a quick review of their
keywords on the web pages. This can be a lengthy and slow process, but luckily the SEO
Studio Keyword Analyzer tool can dig up keywords from your competitor's sites in a snap.
 We'll cover in detail how the Keyword Analyzer can be used to add hundreds of keywords to
your keyword research project.
Keyword research is like a job interview process
In order to find the right candidate you may need to interview hundreds of applicants to find
the perfect fit for the job. Well, the keyword research process is very similar; you have to
cast a wide net first to capture all the possible combinations of keywords known to man.
Even then, it's almost guaranteed you will discover new keywords you have missed in the
original research only a few weeks earlier. What this tells us is the keyword selection and
refinement process never ends, or at least it should not end until you are happy with the
number of visitors you are receiving to your site. 
Where and how to look for keywords
In order to find the best keywords for our website we need to gather information from a
variety of resources. Some of these resources may include:
?  Brainstorming: Getting your brain to go on a magic carpet ride is one of the best
ways to find relevant keywords for your website. Don't just settle for asking the
obvious question, what does my website sell? Ask questions such as: "What is this
product made up of?" or "Who is using my services?,"or "What problems my
products solve?"
?  Paid keyword research tools: These include Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery,
Keywords Analyzer, and Wordze. They give you the crucial keyword popularity data
that is necessary for any keyword research. . All of these are very powerful keyword
research tools, but they can be very expensive unless you do keyword research for
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a number of websites and you get paid for the work. We would recommend trying
the free editions of the Free Wordtracker, and the Free Keyword Discovery tool
before putting some serious money down for their paid editions. If you do decide to
sign up for the paid version, you will most likely not need more than a month long
membership. Finding the main and secondary keyword phrases should take less
than a month for even 2 or 3 websites. This does not mean your keyword research
has ended forever, but finding the 4-5 word long secondary key phrases can be
done with the free keyword research tools if your budget is tight.
?  Free keyword research tools: You can gain access to the powerful and free
Google external keyword tool to expand your keyword list. Unfortunately the Google
external keyword tool only gives a search volume indicator instead of the actual
search numbers. Another very valuable feature in Google external keyword tool is
the "Site-Related Keywords" finder. By simply entering the website URL of your
competitors, you can find out in seconds which keywords they target on their web
pages. Another free keyword research tool available without creating an account is
the Overture keyword inventory. As of now, August 2007 this tool only shows the
January 2007 search volumes as it's being phased out, but Yahoo! is promising a
replacement. If you have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account you can still gain
access to their keyword tool albeit without the search volume numbers.
?  Use pay per click (PPC) advertising: This will assist you in finding and selecting
the best performing keywords based on the click through rate (CTR) and conversion
rates. This is one of the fastest and most effective ways to select relevant keywords
since your target audience is already casting their votes in the forms of clicks for
your site. Testing new keywords with PPC is a very effective and low cost method to
validate new keywords before incorporating them into your web page.
?  Ask your friends and colleagues: Although you may be the expert in your field
and perfectly capable of describing your products and services, you may also have a
narrow focus when it comes to selecting the best keywords for your website. People
who know much less about your business can give you important clues as to how
they would look for your products or services.
?  Related search terms suggestion tools: One of the fastest ways you can find
hundreds of related keywords is to use online lexical or thesaurus tools. Creating a
large initial keyword list that includes a large number of synonyms and acronyms is
essential to effective keyword research. Discovering related phrases that are not
simply stemming from the original keyword term is a cornerstone of semantic latent
indexing. Semantic indexing can be described as the grouping of related documents
based on not only direct relationship between words, but the meaning of the words
as well. For example a computer shopper typing "apple" into the Google search box
expects to see Apple computer in the results, but someone interested in finding
information on the fruit apple, expects to find information on different varieties of
apples and apple growers. It's the semantic latent indexing that helps connect
documents to the correct meaning of the search results and it's believed to be
widely used by Google. 
?  Some of the search engines provide a related search command list in their
search results. Try Clusty by entering a search command and take a look at the
"clusters" side bar. You can get dozens of ideas from the keyword clusters by
playing with different combination of keywords. You can also visit Technorati a well
known blog aggregator and social media tagging site to help unlocked your brain
and generate new keywords. Enter a search term and observe the "Related tags"
section directly under the search results.
?  Visitor statistic reports: These can be generated from web server log files or
from script based visitor statistic programs. This can help you uncover new
keywords for your website by discovering what the visitors are typing into the
search engines to find your websites. In some cases, you'll find keywords you didn't
expect to come up for in the search results. You should further research those
keywords and uncover new keyword niches.
?  Regional keywords and dialects: This can increase your website relevancy to
visitors by using keywords as geographical filters. There can be variations of
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keywords from country to county even in the English speaking world. For example,
in North America, we may use the term "search engine optimization" but in the UK
and Australia most web searchers will be using "search engine optmisation"
?  Misspellings, hyphenated and plural: These keywords can give you a multitude
of additional keywords to target. Search engines can suggest the correctly spelled
or hyphenated keywords in response to your query request, but they can not
change what people actually search for. For this reason, focusing on even a few
misspelled keywords or plural keyword variations can bring a few hundred extra
visitors to your website every month. 
?  Site search engines: This can be a great source of new keywords and a potential
data mining source. As well as further analysis of the average number of keywords,
keyword length and other important keyword metrics.
?  Spy on top ranking competitors: These websites are already well optimized and
contain keyword rich web pages. Why not leverage their efforts and harvest the
best keywords for your own website? With the help of the SEO Studio keyword
analyzer you can extract hundreds of keywords from their META keywords and
HTML page content in seconds. There are two other very powerful free online tools
available to dig up the keywords used by your competitors. The first one is
SEOdigger.com. A great tool that lets you enter your competitors' URLs and within
seconds you'll have hundreds of keywords in front of you with sortable Wordtracker
and Overture keyword popularity data. The other competition spying tool is
Spyfu.com, which helps to identify PPC competitors and the keyword they use to
advertise. SpyFu tells you which keywords each website buys and you can even
track it to the individual pages.