If you have spent any time working with websites, you have probably heard about search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a big topic all over the Internet, and by doing a little research, you can find pretty much all of the tips and tricks that are used by SEO experts for free. The main goal of SEO is to get your site to show up on the search engines in the best possible position. Most of the search engine traffic goes to the first five results that are given for a keyword search. Having your site show up on page one for a keyword phrase that is searched for often will guarantee you a steady flow of traffic on your site. The more traffic you have, the more successful your website will be. That is why search engine optimization is an important part of most online marketing strategies.

There are a lot of parts to SEO that include techniques for writing articles with good keyword content, and optimizing your blog to interact well with the search engines. Another part of the process is determining what keyword phrases we can use to help capture some of that search engine traffic. For this site, my main keyword phrase is online marketing strategies. My hope is that when people search for online marketing strategies that this site will eventually show up on page one in the top five. As I work toward that goal, I need to find other keyword phrases that will complement my main keyword phrase and help increase the number of visitors to the site. I will take you through a quick process for determining good keyword phrases.

For this process we are going to use a free tool from Google called the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You can access this handy keyword tool at

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This Keyword tool is actually designed for people who are going to use adwords as part of their online marketing strategies, but we are going to use the tool to help us get an idea of how much traffic a keyword phrase receives. Here is what you will see when you first access the Google keyword tool:

Type in any keyword phrase you want to search for and fill in the captcha and press the Get Keyword ideas button. I used the keyword phrase successful online business. Google will then provide you with the following results:

In Part 2 of this article I will explain how we can adapt this information to help us figure out how well the keyword phrase will do.

Until then….

Steve