By Jill Kurtz
Online Career Tips Editor
Whether you are writing online content or a resume, it’s important to know what keywords will help you garner attention and attract the right readers. So, how do you find the best keywords? Here are some no-frills techniques that won’t cost you anything more than your time.
Create a Word Cloud
Find one or more pages of content that are related to the topic you want to cover. For online content, this can be a webpage that comes up in a search. For a resume, this can be the job description you are applying for or a wiki page about the field you are looking to enter.
Paste the text into a free word cloud tool such as Wordle or ToCloud. Try not to get too distracted playing with all the options for presentation – your goal is to see the largest words. These are the keywords you will want to use.
Pick Out the Nouns
Keywords are generally nouns. Take the relevant web page or job announcement and paste the text into Word. Go through and delete all the words except the nouns. These are your keywords; the words that appear more than once are the strongest keywords.
Do Some Searches
Start with a word and do a search. Pay attention as you type, because Google will make suggestions for strong search strings based on what you are entering. This alone can give you some great keywords and phrases.
Take note of what comes up on the search results page. Are you getting the type of content that you are aspiring to create? If so, then you have used a good keyword. If not, adjust your search.
If the results are relevant, click some links to get a feeling for strong related words to use along with your keyword. Take note of any content you may want to refer to or link to as part of your writing process.
[Related: Don’t Get Disciplined: 5 Things You Should Not Do at Work]
Test Your Results
Once you have written something around the keywords, have a few people read the page or resume. Ask them for three keywords and make sure they name words that you were targeting. If not, make some edits and try again.
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