"What Are Keywords?"

Keywords are the words that people will think of ..... and look up ..... when they're searching for the goods or services that you offer. Think of Yellow Pages, and think what terms you might want to be listed under. Then think what related terms people might think of to find your particular product.

A "keyword" is a single word - like "restaurant". A "keyword phrase" is a string of two words or more that go together - like "English restaurant".

The best thing to do is to come up with as many keywords and keyword phrases as you can which are relevant to your business ..... and then to find out which of these are actually being used by real people when they look in the search engines.

Fortunately there are tools to help you do this. Some of them are free; others you have to pay for.

Overure Keyword Selection Tool

Amongst the free tools, the most useful is the so-called Overure Keyword Selection Tool, which you can find  here. It's provided for the benefit of advertisers at Overture, which is now part of Yahoo; but anybody can use it.

What you do is type in a keyword or keyword phrase relevant to your business, and the Keyword Selection Tool will tell you how many searches were done on that keyword in Overture in the last month. It will also suggest alternative keywords and keyword phrases, and tell you how many searches were done on them.

And if you're more concerned with searches in your own country than with searches worldwide, the Keyword Selection Tool is also available for indiviual countries - such as the UK or Australia.

Spend an hour or two using this tool, and you can easily compile an extensive list of keywords and keyword phrases that you know people are looking up on the search engines.

Good Keywords

This is another free tool. You can download it from Good Keywords. It combines the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool from a number of countries, and helps you build keyword phrases. It also has other very helpful features - and it's free!

Wordtracker

If you want to take your keyword research up a level, you'll find it's well worth your while taking out a subscription to Wordtracker. You can try out a limited version of Wordtracker free, or sign up to the full service for as little as one day. You can sign up here (a new window will open).

Keyword Discovery

And if you want to go for the Rolls Royce of keyword research tools, Keyword Discovery is the way to go. It's not cheap - but it's very, very thorough - and complements Wordtracker nicely. In fact, they'll give you a discount if you've already signed up to Wordtracker. And you can sign up for a free trial at Keyword Discovery (again, a new window will open).

"What Now?"

As we learned on the Domain Names page, keyword research is important even before we decide on the domain name for our website.

When we've done our keyword research, and we've decided on the domain name - or names - that we want to use, we'll need to register the domain and get some hosting space for our website. We'll do that on the next page : Hosting Our Website.