Keywords

Your keyword research is the first step in the search engine optimization (SEO) process for the lenses you make. You can think of it as market research because you are analyzing what words your potential lens viewers or customers are searching for about your topic.

Effective keyword research can do several things for your lens including:

• Keyword research can help you to remove your own bias of keywords. You may have thought that a certain keyword was the most important one for your topic. But it turns out that no one searches for that word, but there are other similar words with tons of daily searches.


• It can help you come up with a template for your lens. I often like to use some of my main keyword phrases in my module titles. This will give the search engines a greater emphasis on that phrase.


• Keyword research can help you to come up with the copy for your lenses. It is important to use your keywords in your lens, so using your keyword list in your copy can help to guide you with ideas for what to write about.


• Once your lens is finished, effective keyword research and use of the keywords can help to bring in the precious targeted traffic which is what we are all looking for.

When making your lenses, you can add your keywords as tags. While these tags may not be indexed by search engines, they can help to bring your lens traffic from within Squidoo.

Tags are your way of telling Squidoo what your lens is about. In turn, this can help to place your lens in the search results from within Squidoo. This alone can bring in some traffic for the right keywords, or tags.

More traffic can come through Squidoo's Discovery Tool. You can find the Discovery Tool right under the intro module. If you wish, you can add up to three lenses to be displayed here; the rest will be generated by Squidoo. This tool links lenses to other lenses that are similar by their tags. If you choose the right tags, your lens can have a direct link on potentially many other lenses in the same genre and can lead to targeted traffic to your lens.

The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool is powered by Wordtracker's API. It works when you put in a keyword and hit submit, you are provided with an estimation of suggested daily search volumes for Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and an overall daily estimation of all search engines.

In addition for the search estimations of the keyword you entered, you are also provided with a listed of related keywords and their search volume estimations.

The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool is accurate, powerful, and best of all, free.

I like to use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to cross reference keywords with the data from the SEO Book Keyword Tool. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool helps to get new keyword ideas and it also gives you Approximate monthly Google search volume and the Approximate search volume from the previous month so that you can analyze trends.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool will often give data that is not searched as often as the date from the SEO Book Keyword Tool which helps with niches. It also provides a list of additional keywords to consider.

A nice feature of this tool is that you can download the figures into an Excel spreadsheet. It also provides data on advertiser competition which gives you an idea of how hard other Web sites are trying to rank for that keyword by using an advertising campaign.

How are your lenses ranking for your keywords? SEO Cockpit allows for you to have detailed reports of how your keywords are ranking in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You can even set up alerts to notify you if there was a big change. It works easily, simply add your URL's, then your keywords, and the software does the rest providing you with detailed reports of how your lenses rank for each keyword.