What is a keyword tool for SEO

If you are wondering what is a keyword tool for SEO you’ve come to the right place.

If you are a webmaster, blogger or niche marketer the chances are you have heard about keyword tools. If you are new to the business you might be wondering what is SEO or what is a keyword tool and if it’s worth paying for one.

As the internet has exploded in growth in the last decade the competition for search engine ranking has become fierce. The fact is, if you can rank for a high traffic keyword on the first page of Google, you will make money on your site. Since the competition is tough, companies and webmasters are doing everything in their power to rank on the first page.

Google and other search engines of course won’t tell us the exact methods they use to rank sites. To make things worse, every now and then they change those methods. There are however certain rules that are known to be facts by information released by Google and other search engines.

There are also some things that have been shown to improve your rankings by experience. Some of these methods are very controversial. Some swear by them while others don’t believe they have any effect these days.

What is a keyword

Keyword is a word or a phrase that your site, post, page or other content is centered around. The aim is to rank your content on that keyword in search engines. The keyword can be a single word but usually it is a phrase or even a long sentence.

Single word keywords are very hard to rank these days as the search engine algorithms are quite complex and rank your site or channel based on the overall content, so things like keyword stuffing don’t work these days.

With single word keywords you’ll be competing with established large sites with thousands of pages of content. A single word keyword could be something like computer. You would have a very tough time ranking on the first page of Google with that keyword on a new site.

Keywords consisting of sentences or many words are called long tail keywords. These are much easier to rank, if you find low competition ones.

A long tail keyword related to our previous example could be something like Best laptop computers 2018. This keyword would be much easier to rank on the first page of Google as it’s much more specific. That’s actually a great keyword with low competition, so if you have technology or computer related blog, you might want to use that.

Semantic keywords

As I told you before, the search engines rank your site based on the overall content and how well it seems to be centered around the search term. This is where semantic keywords come in.

Semantic keywords are words and phrases commonly associated with your main keyword. The search engines use these to figure out if your content is truly associated with the search term (keyword).

Search engines aim to provide the most related and valuable content when someone makes a search so it’s important to them that the search results are actually related to the search term and not just random sites that happen to have the keyword in their title or domain name.

For our Best laptop computers 2018 keyword some semantic keywords could be What makes a good lap top, Laptop computer reviews or Computer benchmark. These are just examples of the top of my head and I haven’t done any research on them so be aware of that if you decide to use them.

What is SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of affecting the visibility of your content in search engine results. It includes everything from page design to content and keyword research. Interaction within the site and social media visibility have also become important in the last decade.

As we have already established, content is the most important part of SEO these days. The quality and relevance of your content is everything when it comes to how the search engines perceive you.

Search engines like well written and long articles or posts with high relevance to the keyword. This kind of content tells the search engine algorithms that the content offers valuable information associated with the keyword, so it would be valuable to show as a search result.

Search engines appreciate website that load fast and work on all devices and browsers as the internet is used increasingly with mobile devices. That’s why it’s important to make sure your web design is clean, loads fast, works on both desktops and mobile devices and contain no dead links or other irrelevant information.

If you have lots of links pointing to removed sites or other issues with your link structure, the search engines will not like this as they want to offer their clients quality.

Same goes with sites with lots of animation and large uncompressed pictures that increase the load time. These days the internet is all about information that has to be available fast It doesn’t matter if you have the fanciest site in the world if it takes ages to load. The search engines love fast loading sites and this is especially important for mobile devices as there are data limitations.

Social sharing and interaction within your site is one other thing the search engines appreciate as this gives the signal you content is being shared so it must offer some value to others.

Comments on your site tells the search engines there is some established traffic that has shown interest in the topic. This increases your sites desirability in the eyes of the search engines.

Things that don’t work in SEO

Things that really don’t seem to have an effect on your rankings include backlinks and keyword stuffing. These can be bad or even detrimental for your site in 2018.

Backlinks were something the search engines appreciated not long ago. The reasoning was that a site that had links pointed to it by other sites, must be of value, as other sites have seen it valuable enough link to it.

This however created a whole business of creating “fake” backlinks through blog networks and other services and it has been pretty much ditched as a ranking basis. Well actually relevant backlinks from high authority domains are a significant matter but the best way to get them is to create high-quality content. People will naturally link to your site eventually once you create enough high-quality content.

Keyword stuffing is a very old tactic used in the days when the search engine algorithms were very simple and just looked for the keyword when determining how relevant the content is to the search.

Stuffing your content with keyword is frowned upon by the search engines, so use your main keyword wisely. Maybe use it in the title and mention it once in the beginning of your post but otherwise, you should write naturally and use semantic keywords.

What is a keyword tool

So now that we know what a keyword is and why it’s important for SEO, it’s time to talk about keyword research tools. Keyword tool is a crucial part of keyword research needed in SEO. To rank your keyword high in the search engines, with a new site, you need to find low competition keywords with traffic. This is called keyword research.

It’s futile to write about topics no one is interested in as there won’t be any searches made. Your aim as a content creator is surely to receive some traffic interested in whatever it is your content is about. On the other hand, the more traffic a keyword receives tougher the competition will be.

This is where a keyword tool comes in. A keyword tool is used to search for keywords associated with your niche.

Keyword tools are programs that gather information from the search engines to determine the number of searches made on the keyword and it’s’s potential. Most keyword tools are browser-based these days.

A good keyword tool will offer you information on the number of searches made on the keyword, the competition for that keyword and the keywords SEO potential. They will also offer you optional keywords so you don’t need to keep guessing keywords randomly.

Pretty much all the good keyword tools are paid services. The Google Adwords keyword tool used to be pretty good but it’s not really useful for niche marketing and SEO as the metrics are geared more towards Adwords campaigns.

The best keyword research tool

I use a service called Jaaxy as my keyword research tool. It’s arguably the best keyword tool around for niche marketing and thousands of marketers vouch for its effectiveness. I’ll be writing a detailed review about Jaaxy soon, but if you want to find out more right now I wrote about using Jaaxy in this post.

You can get Jaaxy Lite for free with a Wealthy Affiliate premium plan, so it’s definitely something you should consider if you are interested in creating an online business.

Go ahead and try Jaaxy for some quick keyword ideas:

Jaaxy offers three membership levels and you can try it out for free. I actually use a Jaaxy Lite version that only comes with the Premium membership of Wealthy Affiliate.

That’s about it for keyword tools for today. I hope this post was useful to you. If you have any questions please drop a comment below and I will do my best to answer you!