Search engine optimization is of paramount importance when it comes to generating traffic to your site using search engines. The ranking of pages within the search engines results lies entirely on the use of the relevant keywords with regards to how strong the keywords are. Jut a slight difference in the page rank results could mean a major difference in the online sales revenue. With this in mind it is important to identify strong keywords in order to be ranked better on the search engines and hence increase on your sales revenue.

The following are key steps useful in identifying strong keywords;

1. Make a keyword list
2. Make use of free tools in expanding the list
3. Identify topics to write on relevant to the keywords

These are the basics to identifying competitive keywords. Neglecting this and dreaming that you will drive traffic to your site over night is naïve. Use this as your daily, weekly or monthly SEO task. Making use of hundreds of keywords may help your content to be visible on the live searches.

1. Make a List

Brain storm through a number of keywords that you may think searchers will type on a relevant search; try to think of keyword phrases that are relevant to your niche. Make use of synonyms and common misspellings that web searches type in the search boxes and these must be relevant to your content.

Don’t edit your list. Use each word to discover the next keyword phrase. This is just the starting point of organic SEO.

2. Use free tools to expand your list

Place your keywords into Goggle’s AdWords Keywords tool. Here you will be able to expand your list of keywords whilst getting read of keywords with high search volumes as these may be difficult to compete with especially as a beginner in SEO.

The Google AdWords tool will provide you with synonyms of the words that you have listed whilst giving your ideas on keywords to use with relation to your content. The search volume obtained on this tool is simply the Global search volume of web users within a 12 month period.

Another free word search tool is Word Tracker’s Keyword Suggestion tool. This tool will give you keyword phrase suggestions using different search volume sets. For instance it may show you the search volume of a keyword only in the US for the previous year.

The above tools will help you to carefully identify keywords that will give you the best SEO results.

3. Find topics to write from your list

As you make your keyword list you may find suggestions of keywords that you may have never thought of before. These keywords will awaken different thoughts or ideas in your mind with regards to the topics to write. When writing an SEO topic you must have the keyword phrases in the title, first paragraph and heading.