What is a Keyword?
Keywords are the way that search engines determine what it is that you are looking for on the internet. The search engines look at the keyword and compare it to those that are present on webpages. When there is a good match and they look at the context of your search and that of the pages that contain the terms you have entered. This is all done using keywords.
A keyword is not just one word. It can be a set of words. This is called a long-tailed keyword. As your term adds words, the keyword becomes more targeted. Long-tailed keywords provide more information to the search engines and allow for a more refined search. Any additional information is used to provide a more relevant search, this will allow the search engines to focus more clearly on what it is that you want.
What Does Keyword Search Software Do?
Do you want to know what your competition is doing? Why are they getting all their traffic? What is it that makes their website better than yours? You can struggle for weeks learning this information the hard way or you can use some Keyword Search Software to do the trick for you.
When I am doing research on a competitor or a new niche, I will find a general term that fits the niche then search this keyword term in the Google Keyword Search Software. This is called the Google Adwords keyword tool. This keyword software is free and has been optimized for Pay Per Click but can be useful for determining what keywords a specific site is targeting for their promotions. It is helpful for determining the relative size of your competition for a particular keyword as well.
Enter their site into the keyword tool and export the results to a spreadsheet. It is not necessary to save the data just the keyword list. I then take this list over to either the Wealthy Affiliates Keyword tool or the Jaaxy Keyword tool (both have a 30 free searches trial) and locate some related keywords that are available with high search volume and a low number of competing sites. Competing sites impact the chances that your site will rank for a particular term. Higher competition results in a lower chance that you can get a particular term to rank.
In a short period of time, I have located a group of keywords to include in my own promotions that have a good chance of being well ranked in the search engines and will provide a good volume of traffic to my site or article promotions.