Search Engine Optimization Made Easy

It’s easy to increase your ranking by adding a few SEO elements, so why not do it? There are many, many tools that help with keyword research. Adding these to your titles and tags won’t rocket you to the top of the charts, but combined with good copy you’ll have a much more effective site.

One of the simplest tools is the Google Keywords tool, which allows you to enter a search term and compare its popularity to similar terms. For example, if you sell rakes for gardening, Google will tell you that “Gardening Rakes” is a much more commonly searched term that “Garden Rakes”. It may seem like a tiny distinction, but it can dramatically increase the amount of traffic you get.

When you’re compiling your list of keywords, another factor to keep in mind is your competition. You can also find some information here on Google, although it’s a little difficult to interpret.

What you’re looking for is a popular search term with low competition. The trick is that in Google, the competition is a factor of the number of sites that use that key term. This can be misleading. “Gardening”   has a huge popularity number as you can imagine. Millions of people type “Gardening” into their search box.  But it’s also listed as a low-competition site. Why? Because the competition figure is relative to the number of sites using “Gardening” as a keyword.

Another popular free site is KeywordDiscovery.com. In this much simpler site you can get an idea of how many times a keyword has been searched for in the past 12 months. There are many other free keyword analysis sites, most of which are very straightforward. But note that there are also subscription sites which will give you much more sophisticated information.

Bottom Line: Start small with your keywords, and gradually add them to your pages, posts, and articles.