"What Is a Keyword ... & Why Are Keywords Important?"

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

Google Keyword Research Tool

Amongst the free tools, the most useful is the so-called Google Keyword Tool, which you can find here. It's provided for the benefit of advertisers using Google Adwords, but anybody can use it.

What you do is type in a keyword or keyword phrase relevant to your business, and the Keyword Research Tool will tell you how many searches were done on that keyword in Google in your country (or in another country, if you prefer) in the last month. It will also give you a monthly average figure for searches worldwide. And it will also suggest alternative keywords and keyword phrases, and tell you how many searches were done on them.

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 tools from a number of countries, and helps you build keyword phrases. It also has other very helpful features - and it's free!

Keyword Elite

This is a program you have to pay for, I'm afraid ... but it's well worth the investment. It enables you to generate lists of over 10,000 keywords in just a few minutes AND to find out which keywords are actually making money! One of the best keyword tools for SEO optimization (search engine optimization). 

"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.