Google Webmaster Tools have a feature that may help many web site owners assess their keyword strengths. The keyword utility is very basic and does only cover single words, however, it does give you an indication of what Google is seeing as keywords.

Professional SEO consultants use a wide variety of tools and will find this feature fairly lame. However, for those doing their own SEO, this feature will at least be a useful guide. It will certainly surprise you with some of the results.

To access the feature, log in to Webmaster Tools – Your site on the web – then Keywords. You will see a list of words with a coloured bar showing that word’s significance. Be careful, the comparison is only for your site and has nothing to do with any search results or rankings. The top keyword has the most significance and the rest measured against that top keyword.

You will need to some filtering. For example, if you run a blog then author names may well appear as the number one keyword – it appears at the bottom of every post – I am sure there is a message there, have a keyword as the post author.

There are other obvious words to filter. For example, “new”, “sale”, “blog”, “buy”. These are all words that appear throughout a site on a regular basis. If your important keywords are low down on the list then you will need to create more content that gives those keywords a little boost. You will need to be creative without being spammy – you will also need to watch the frequency of those non-keyword terms – if you can reduce them whilst increasing your keyword use – so much the better.

It’s not a fantastic tool so don’t get too wrapped up in it. However, it can be a reasonable guide as to how successful you are at presenting your keywords to the search engines.

Recent Entries

• Why A Search Engine Googopoly Is Bad For The Internet
• Blogging For The Sake Of Blogging Is Not Blogging
• How To Create An Effective Social Marketing Tweet
• Internal Linking – Don’t Be Afraid Of The Long Tail
• Adding Your Scotland Based Local Business To AOL
• Don’t Be Too Quick To Dismiss Google Buzz
• Are Guest Posts A Bad Link Building Strategy?
• Can You Overdo SEO?
• Review Sites And SEO For Scotland Local Businesses
• What Effect Will HTML5 Have On Web Design And SEO

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Keyword Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.