Source: Google.com

When designing a website, you should optimise the site for your chosen keywords. This is crucial in order to do battle in the search engine field. But which are the best words to choose? Don’t go into battle un-armed! Do your research first - it’s no use thinking you have a niche market and base your web page on a keyword or key phrase which no-one searches for! In the words of Google, "see what the world is searching for". Google have made available an interesting free tool called "Google Trends", where you can compare interest in keywords in different countries and regions. Google say that this new tool is still in an early stage of development, and may contain inaccuracies, but it still makes very interesting comparisons which you should consider when choosing keywords.

You may compare up to 5 different keywords or phrases, separated by a comma, and see how often they have been searched for. The results are shown in a graph with a different colour for each keyword phrase. This is the overview - you should then view the bar graphs for individual countries/regions. You will see that what may be a popular keyword in one country is far less popular in another region. You can choose to see the results from all countries or one specific country, by using the drop down boxes in the upper right corner of the Google Trends results page. You can also choose to view results for a specific month or year from 2004 by using the other drop down box. The results graph enables you to view the search trends for your keywords, i.e. is the trend increasing or decreasing? If it is decreasing significantly, do you really want to choose that keyword? You can also see at a glance any seasonal changes to the popularity of keywords, such as those increasing over the Christmas period.

In choosing keywords, you should also consider how many other websites are already using your preferred keywords. If you search on Google for a popular keyword, you may find too many other websites already focusing their site around that keyword, and of course it will be much more difficult to get good search engine results. So take all factors into account. For example, if you compare "handbags" and "designer handbags" on Google Trends, you will see that many more searches are undertaken for the keyword "handbag". Now do a Google search for "handbags", and you will find 43 million results. A Google search for "designer handbags" gives you 6 million results. So whilst the Google Trends results show more searches for "handbags", you will probably prefer to use a set of keywords as a phrase with less competition from other websites, as this will help to increase your search engine results. Well done Google, and thanks for a quality free webmaster tool that is quick and simple to use!

Try this tool at http://www.google.com/trends

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