Posted by Adam T. Sutton in Internet Marketing Strategy	September 13, 2007

Test targeted keywords and content optimization for free

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group, LLC

Everybody is on a budget. That's why we're mentioning two free search engine marketing tools today that can help you boost search rankings without boosting spend.

The first is WordTracker's free keyword suggestion tool. The tool works as a thesaurus and a search-volume estimator, revealing phrases that may be worth targeting in your campaign.

This tool can help all levels of search marketers. If you're just starting SEO, it can help you discover your target phrases. If you're neck deep in search marketing, it can help you find more keywords that have little competition.

Take a minute and try entering your business' keywords. You might be surprised at the phrases and numbers that appear.

The second tool is for after you have targeted keywords. By entering a URL in Motoricerca's free keyword density calculator, you'll receive a list of all the repeated phrases on the page and their frequency.

Content that frequently mentions a keyword usually has a higher ranking than content that does not (holding all other factors constant). Since this tool reveals how often a keyword appears on a page, it's very useful for SEOing content.

After running a scan on yesterday's Mequoda Daily, the calculator estimated that the term "online publishing strategy" had a density of 7.25 percent for three word phrases, and "online publishing" had a density of 4 percent for two word phrases.

Good keyword density for an article webpage is about 3 to 5 percent, and those percentages should be higher for landing pages, according to Mequoda's Managing Director Don Nicholas.

Motoricerca's tool also lists every set of one, two and three word phrases that appear on the given URL. This makes for a lot of erroneous information, but it also reveals other phrases that could become targeted keywords.

Anyway, take a look at those free tools and see if they reveal anything about your current SEO campaign. It will only cost you a little time and it may help you rank higher for more keywords.