Keywords are important for bringing visitors to your web site. They are the glue that connects you to their searches. And they are the pivotal point in optimizing your web site for good rankings on the search engines.

Too often, we are inclined to add as many keywords to a page as we possibly can. What you end up making is soup. Let say you put some chicken in a pot. Then you add some beef and pork. Vegetables add nice color so you add carrots and broccoli and peas. You spice it up with onions, garlic, and pepper. So, what kind of soup do you have?

Search engines have the same problem figuring out your pages as you do with the soup. Add too many keywords to the page and they have trouble figuring out what it's about. Each page should have it's own flavor. Choosing your keywords wisely will help you do this.

You need to find terms relevant to your web pages. The trick is finding terms people are using in their searches. You might think your goal is getting a number one ranking on Google. But if no one is using your keywords in their searches, you won't receive any traffic.

On the other hand, you can find a term that is very popular and still find yourself in trouble. If the word is too popular, there will be millions of web pages you will be competing against on the search engines. Often, those keywords lack focus and are too general. You have to use keywords that will lead searchers to what they intended to find, not just what they asked for.

What you really want is keywords that are popular with searchers but not popular with your competitors. Find that combination and you will bring visitors who are interested in what you have on your site and you will have an easier time getting good rankings.

If you have trouble with too much competition for your keywords, focus. The more you narrow your subject, the easier it will be for you to achieve top rankings. It is better to have many narrowly focused pages that rank well than to spend a great deal of time and energy trying to fight your way to the top. With too many competitors, you are not likely to succeed.

The following tools can be used in helping you find the most productive keywords for you web pages.

Keyword Tumbler

In producing the best search results, search engines first try to produce an exact match to the terms typed into the search input box. As people refine their searches, they will often add words to the end of their search phrase. As a result, words may not be in the order you optimized your page for.

A principle scientist at Google, Amit Singhal, says that more than half the 200 million searches done each day have never been searched before. Keyword Tumbler mixes up the search words into all their unique combinations.

Overture Keyword Selector Tool

It is important that people are actually searching on the keywords you have selected. Enter your keywords here and you can see how many searches were made on that term during the previous month. If the result contains a great deal of searches, your terms may be too general and contained in other more focused search terms. Review those results to help you narrow your focus.

Keyword Suggestion Tool

This site compares the number of searches made per day for both Overture and WordTracker. Some feel that WordTracker results may be more accurate as Overture searches can be tainted with searches made my advertisers checking theirs and other advertisers' rankings.

Keyword Ranking Tool

This tool will track your web site ranking for each of your keyword phrases. It will show your daily, weekly and monthly changes in ranking. When you make changes to your pages, you need to know the result of those changes. This will help you know if you are moving in the right direction.

Keyword Density Analyzer

If you are unsure of what keywords your web pages are showing to the search engines, this tool will give you a list of the most frequently repeated words on your page. You can pretty much ignore the single-word keywords. Few people search using only one word and the results are very general.

Google Keyword Suggestion Tool

Start typing in your keywords and Google will show a list of 10 keywords matching what you have typed. Beside each term is the number of web pages Google has indexed matching that term. Try to find terms that list less than 3 or 4 million pages.

The Dowser

This is a desktop application that combines some of the tools above and also adds Google's keyword synonym tool. With this tool, you can find keywords that have similar meanings but are completely different words.