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Choosing keywords using Google Adwords Keywords Tool

Watch the screencast (3:30)

Visit the Google AdWords Keyword Tool

One of the trickiest parts about SEO is choosing the right keywords to target. What terms do you want to rank well in the search engines for? Let me let you in on a little secret: you're not going to make the top 10 in Google for "MP3", "Christmas gifts" or "Computer". The sites with top 10 spots for those terms are typically large, well established sites, usually with substantial SEO budgets. If you want to compete for those terms, then good luck to you and let me know how you get on.

However, it's not all bad news. There's two things you can and should do instead. Firstly, choose keywords that are still popular but less competitive. "Christmas gifts" might be impossible to get top 10 for, but what about "Original Christmas gifts"? You can't get MP3 but with enough work you might just make it top 10 for "easy listening MP3".

How do you work out which of these words are targetting? There's no point getting top 10 "easy listening MP3" if no one is searching for it. Fortunately, there are a few good tools out there to help.

Firstly, Google has their Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You can watch a screencast (3:30) showing you exactly how to do this.

There is another similar tool, the Overture Keyword Selector Tool (Overture are now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing or YSM). This tool is fairly straight forward in showing the volumes of various searches in the Yahoo! network.

The other big thing to do is look at the long tail of search marketing - a big enough subject to have it's own article!