If you've been working on setting up your own website or blog for any length of time, I'm sure you've heard the term keywords. Keywords are very important when it comes to getting free targeted traffic to your website. Let's take a look at what you need to know to get the best keywords for your website.

What Are Keywords

Keywords are words and phrases that people type in to search engines (like Google) to find things they are interested in. For example, if I am considering relocating to Charlotte, NC, I may search for things like "realtors in charlotte, nc" or "home for sale in charlotte, nc" or even "best schools in charlotte, nc". Those are all keywords.

Another example would be "kale chips recipe" which is something I made earlier this week. Sometimes a keyword is just one word like "marketing" for example, but the vast majority of the time we find ourselves typing in longer phrases that often include 3 or more words. They are sometimes called "key phrases" instead of keywords.

How To Find Keywords

The next question is of course how can we figure out what people will search for. If you can identify with your target audience, you can probably take a pretty good guess at what they will search for. You can then take some of those core search terms or keywords and plug them into keyword tools to get an extensive list of terms that people search for.

The two keyword tools I like to use are the free Google Keyword tool and the paid version of Wordtracker. The Google keyword tool gives you a great bit of data on what people search for and a good guess at how often it is searched for.

The Wordtracker tool takes it a step further by also taking a look at how hard it will be to rank for any given one in the search results. In other words, how hard it will be to get on page one of Google for that term.

What Keywords To Use Where On Your Website

Before you head off to your favorite keyword tool, I want to give you some quick tips on what keywords you want to use where on your website.

I like to divide the keywords into 3 different types:

The Main Keyword - This is usually one term or two related terms at most that get a lot of searches but are also hard to rank for. For example, If I was working on a site about potty training, "potty training" would be my main keyword. This is what I eventually want to rank for on my home page. It will take some time and a lot of marketing to get there, but it will be well worth it in the end.

Related High Search Volume Terms - Next, I find several related terms that are not quite as hard to rank for but still get a good bit of search engine traffic. Those will become my category pages. On a potty training site, those may be things like "potty training tips", "potty training articles", "potty chairs", "bed wetting" etc.

Long Tail Keywords - Everything else goes into the long tail category. These are usually phrases that are 3 or more words long. These are the keywords I will use to write individual articles and blog posts. I love the fact that there are so many long tail searches out there, that I almost never run out of ideas for things to write about and the fact that it is pretty easy to rank for some of these phrases. They may only get a few searches per month, but all those will add up to a lot of traffic as your site grows.

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