Before starting optimizing your website for search engines, it is essential to find out which keywords to use. This is what search engine optimizers call keyword research. It is not only about popularity but also about other factors such as competitiveness, location, etc. There are several different ways to find keywords for your website. I will focus on three simple but effective ways: people, keyword suggestion tools and competitors.

1. People

A mistake that too many website owners do is that they do not try imagine themselves as potential customers. Try to forget everything you know about your product or service and ask yourself how you would call it. What words do your customers use to call your product or service? What words do they type in search engines to search for businesses like yours? You may not use the same vocabulary than yours customers. You also may simply want to ask around you: your friends, colleagues… and of course your customers themselves. Make a list of keywords and check their popularity and competitiveness with a keyword suggestion tool.

2. Keyword suggestion tools

There are plenty of keyword suggestion tools available on the web. Some are free, some are not. I tend to use Google’s keyword suggestion tool: Google AdWords: Keyword Tool. It has originally been designed to help people finding keywords for their Google AdWords campaigns but it works fine for search engine optimization purposes. I’m pretty sure Microsoft and Yahoo! have their own. Otherwise, you may be interested in paid keyword suggestion tools such as Wordtracker and  Keyword Discovery or even a keyword research software like Keyword Elite. This kind of program can help you achieve great results with only little effort. I believe keyword suggestion tools are an essential step in keyword research. They will help you verify how popular and competitive keywords are.

3. Competitors

Finally, I believe it is definitely worth taking a look at the keywords your competitors use. Visit their website and see in the page source (View > Source with Internet Explorer and View > Page Source with Firefox) which keywords are used in the page title, keywords tag, description tag, etc. The page title also shows up in the bar at the very top of  your web browser. However, it is not because your competitor uses a keyword that it is necessarily the best choice for your website.

There are a few other keyword research techniques – trend monitoring tools can be very useful in some cases – but these three should help you start building a comprehensive list of keywords to use when optimizing your website.