In order to better perform search engine optimization, you will need a few SEO tools to get you started. There are many more advanced SEO tools (both paid and unpaid), but I will cover the basics:
- Google’s keyword tool
- A spreadsheet program
- Google’s Website Optimizer
- Google Analytics
For the interest of time, I will cover the first two.
Google’s Keyword SEO Tool
This is the first SEO tool in anyone’s arsenal. Not only is it quite dependable, it is also free. You can find it by going to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, or at anytime just googling the word, “keyword”.
First, begin by searching for terms relevant to your website. If you are beginning with a site about vitamins, type in words like vitamin supplements, and oral vitamins.
Open up your spreadsheet program (most use Excel, but OpenOffice.org’s free spreadsheet works great too. Export the list of keywords, and save the average number of searches, and delete the rest of the columns. Then delete the rows for the keywords that are irrelevant, or you wouldn’t consider using.
Who Knew Google Itself Could Be an SEO Tool?
Title the next column over ‘Results’. For each keyword on the list, go into Google, and search for it. Take note of the number of results, and type that into the column. This shows you the amount of competition for that keyword. This will take a while to search for every keyword, but it’s worth it.
The R/S Ratio
Once both columns have numbers in them, do a formula in a free column of the number of Results (competing pages) over the number of user Searches (from the adwords keyword tool). This is your R/S ratio. The lower the number on your RS ratio, the higher the searches and the lower the amount of competition.
The words with the lowest R/S Ratio are ideally the best to choose, but consider the overall number of searches as well. If the lowest R/S ratio is 39, but it only gets 39 searches, that wouldn’t be enough to make optimizing a page worthwhile.
Join Us For The Next SEO Tools
That concludes our introduction of the keyword SEO tool and the keyword research SEO tool. More SEO tools later!
