Keywords and Adsense

Keywords are used by search engines like Google. It works two ways: The keywords in your content are used by Google to classify your site and they are used by Google users to find the content they're looking for. They are one to three words in general. In order to build a findable site, you needs keywords, but which ones? How do you select the right ones? This article may give some nice clues which may increase traffic and revenue.
I believe you cannot be successful in SEO without keyword research. Your website must show in search results for key phrases that indicate interest in your content and deliver some kind of benefit or you'd better take it offline! So it’s very important to find and test keywords.

Free Keyword Research Tools

Google Keyword Tool This online tool looks clean, has the right features and is frequently updated. It is excellent for keyword phrases up to three words.

Wordtracker The free tool give you 100 results. If you want to see all keywords, you must pay. Its free database is very detailed, so I wouldn't bother.

Yahoo Search Marketing Google's prime competitor also got a keyword research tool. It takes a bit more time with its wizard-like workflow, but it's always good to check out. Its always a risk to rely on just one source.

Don't overdo it - play honest

The keyword concept works quite easy, so you may think: why not just fill my page with these keywords to attract the most visitors? Some time ago it wasn't uncommon to put keywords on your site in the background color. This is not acceptable to Google and your site and account may well be banned from the Adsense programme. Tricks like these are called "black hat tactics".
However, there are methods that organically produce better search engine results using the knowledge around how web pages are analyzed. These are known as "white hat". You should be fine using these to get to the top-10 page. But keep in mind your method may only work a short while. Search engine algorithms are changed and improved frequently to do what they should: provide the best search results to the user. Your best choice would be not to rely on tactics to get the best revenue, but provide quality content in a findable way.

One white-hat tip to get you on the way: realize you got two types of users on your site: people and web crawlers used by search engines. If you present your content in a logical way to both, it'll be rewarding.


There's some other tools I find useful to take a better look at keyword density. Again: please beware not take the wrong approach here. If you over-use the keywords, you'll scare away both Google and your readers. If you see a density > 5% you may well be in trouble. Keep this in mind when writing, as this rule applies to every single page of your site. Most important page is your home page, of course. And certainly you'll want to use the optimal keyword density when optimizing that one for the search engines. 

Keyword density checker is a tool that can help you to optimize your pages. If you would have your page found on a certain keyword, you can check if that is likely. 

Keyword cloud / density checker is a bit simpler, but I think easier to use. They have a nice article to read about SEO optimization (and SEO overkill) here.