How to find good keywords for your small business website

If you own a small business website, chances are at some stage you'll have wondered which "keywords" or "keyword phrases" to include within your webpages.

At Bytestart, we always ensure that our content matches the keywords we are interested in - and hope the major search engines rank our pages accordingly. Simply stuffing a webpage full of your favourite keywords will do nothing for your search engine visibility.

Although the "KEYWORD" meta tag is not thought to be of great importance to Google (the "TITLE" tag being much more important), the phrases used throughout each webpage document will be picked up and used to determine how relevant the search engine thinks your page is for a given search term.

Finding good keywords and phrases is an important area of web marketing, but how on earth do you find out which phrases are suitable for your site, and which are way too competitive to even bother with.

Here are a few suggestions for keyword research:

Keyword Suggestion Tools

Good keywords are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being targeted by many other websites (low competition). There are a number of tools out there that can help you find them.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool - Here

The best free tool, which generates synonyms and variants of your suggested keywords. You simply type in the words (or phrases) which are relevant to your site content, and the tool will return some helpful statistics related to them.

For example, how strong the advertiser competition is for those words (a good indicator), and the approximate search volume for those words. If competition is very strong for your chosen words, try using longer phrases, as you're better of going for a large number of less competitive phrases than the most competitive single words.

Wordtracker - Here

Probably the best known keyword suggestion tool out there, Wordtracker aims to help site owners identify keywords which are most relevant to their business, and which web surfers are most likely to type into search engines. The site has a database of over 330m search terms, so is widely considered to provide a fairly accurate view of current search trends.

Once you type in the phrases you think will be popular, Wordtracker will come back with a score based on the number of users searching for that phrase. You'll be surprised how differently people search compared to how you perceive they will search.

You can get a free trial (limited functionality), or sign up for monthly or annual usage of the site. A monthly subscription currently costs around £29 (Nov 2008)

Keyword Spy - Here

This is a handy resource which can help you find out which keywords your competitors are using. Type in their web address, and the tool will return the words your competitors are targeting. Although you can sign up to a free trial, you're looking at $89 per month for an ongoing subscription (Nov 2008).

If you would like to add a resource here, please email us.