Selecting and using keywords correctly is one of the best ways that you can positively affect your search engine standings. The following online keyword tools can help you to both choose effective keywords and make sure that you’re using them properly on your page.

Finding Keywords

So, say you sell baskets and you’re looking to get those interested in your products to your Website. Obviously “basket” and “baskets” are great keywords, but what else would also be?

Tools like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool let you take a peek behind the curtains at the Adwords network to see what people are searching for. In addition to “baskets”, you’ll also find “basket weaving”, “gift basket”, “woven basket”, and any number of other keywords and keyphrases that you can sift through and pick from.

You can enter keywords/phrases (or the URLs of your competitors) to get keyword ideas, and the search results will tell you how popular each word or phrase is and how much advertiser competition there is for each. These can give you a good idea of what is doing well on the Google network (and as goes Google…). You can also filter out words, so that undesirable hits like “basket case” or “basket ball” don’t show up in the results. The tool will also give you a list of related word and phrase ideas (ex. wicker, hamper).

Additional tools such as Wordtracker and Wordstream also provide a similar service, although the free versions of these tools are less robust than what Google offers for free.

Keyword Density Tools

Once you’ve found your keywords, how often should you use them on your pages? How often are the search leaders in your niche using the same words on their pages? Search algorithms are constantly in flux, so while its hard to say for sure, 3-5% density (leaning towards the low end of that range) seems to be the most popular estimate to shoot for. That said, don’t discount a different percentage if your top competitor is having a ton of success with it.

How do you calculate your keyword density? While you could count up each instance of a keyword and compare it to the complete word count of your page, using a keyword density tool is a much easier way to go. SEOBench.com offers a great (and free) tool in their Keyword Density Analyzer. Just feed the tool a URL and it’ll spit out your top-ranking words, showing how often they appear and what the overall density of each word is. Not only that, but it will also show you how any two and three word phrases it finds amongst your text fair.

SEO Chat offers a similar tool, with the addition of a “keyword cloud” feature. If you’re a fan of word clouds, check it out.

You can find more information on working with keywords in our article, Writing Content for the Internet, Part II: Writing for search Engines.