Search Engine Optimization Academy

Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) is the tool that virtually all SEO professionals use. I know of no other tool that matches it or that is anywhere near as popular. And it’s cheap to use, so I recommend that you do so.

Wordtracker lets you create projects so you can store different groups of terms - perhaps one for each Web site or, if you're a consultant, one for each client. The first thing you should do - after plunking down your money and setting up the standard username and password stuff - is create a project.

To use Wordtracker to find more words that might be appropriate, follow these steps: 1-Click the Home button in the navigation bar at the top of any Wordtracker page to go to the Wordtracker home page.

After you've worked through your list, checking for relevant terms, click the Click Here for Step 3 link at the bottom of the page. On the Step 3 page, you see the first 100 words in your project, with the most common appearing first.

By doing a competitive analysis, you can identify terms that are searched for frequently but yield few results. If you then use these keywords on your pages, your pages are more likely to rank high in the search engines because you face little competition from other sites.

When you've finished working with a keyword tool, look at the final list to determine how popular a keyword phrase actually is. You may find that many of your original terms are not worth bothering with. You'll also find other terms near the top of the final list that you hadn’t thought about. The next several sections help you clean up this list.