I have previously written about the importance of keyword research for successful website exposure and why all website owners should conduct thorough keyword research before the website goes live.  Now I will present a very easy way that a website owner interested in getting search engine traffic can find relevant keywords for free.  Of course, there are many expensive tools that will allow one to dig deeper into each keyword to find out other important details, but for the purposes of this post, I will stick to this very easy, free way to find good, relevant keywords.

Use Google and Yahoo's suggest feature!

Google and Yahoo each have a keyword suggest feature. The search engines are basically TELLING YOU what people are searching for (so these are the terms that your site should focus on). Try it yourself. Start by typing into Google and Yahoo:

1. "Mississippi"
2. (now add the term "web") so... "Mississippi Web"
3. (now add the term "design") so... "Mississippi web design"

I personally believe that Yahoo has a much better suggest feature than Google and here is why: Take a look at the results from Google:

As you can see, Google uncovers just two keywords when I type "Mississippi web". Mississippi web design and Mississippi website design. Those are fairly generic and will probably be tough to get high organic rankings in a short amount of time (however, those generic terms would be great long term goals to rank for).

Now let's see what Yahoo came up with:

Look at all those long tail terms that Yahoo uncovered for me (there are even more that you can not see as indicated by the red circle)! These are terms that people are actually searching for on Yahoo that are related to Mississippi web design. Granted, the search volume will be relatively low, but that is what the long tail is all about- low, TARGETED traffic. Now that I know people are searching for "Mississippi web design firms" (a term that I would not have even thought to target without Yahoo's help), I can now target this specific keyword phrase on a page on my website and hopefully start to receive traffic from people that are searching for exactly that- Mississippi web design firms.

Now you can see the power in the suggest feature on Yahoo and Google. The fact that the search engines are telling us what people typically are typing in is a great feature. Both search engines' suggest feature have their pros and cons and in this case Yahoo found the better terms to target. However, the point of this post is not to determine a winner between Google and Yahoo's suggest feature, but rather to show you how easy the search engines make it for you, the internet marketer, to find good keywords.

Now that you can see the power of Google and Yahoo's suggest feature, go out now and use this simple technique in your online marketing today.

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