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The Following is the TRANSCRIPT for the episode Search Engine Optimization with the Google Keyword Tool:

And welcome to another episode of seoFool. I’m John Elder, your seoFool.

KEYWORDS….Without a doubt, the most important part of SEO is keyword research. You can optimize your web site out the wazoo, but if you aren’t optimizing for the right keywords, you won’t get any results.

There’s a TON of great tools out there to help you pick the right keywords….

some of them cost money….some of them cost a lot of money….and some of them are free.

Today I want to show you the best free one….the Google Keyword Tool.

I also want to show you a couple tips for integrating it into Google Docs to use it more efficiently. So even if you’re familiar with the keyword tool, you’ll want to stick around for this….

So let’s DIVE right in and take a look…

Uh….Dive….poor choice of words…. Let’s try that again….

Ok so here we are at Google. I can never remember the address to the keyword tool so I always just come here and type it in and its always like the first one listed so…

Here we are on the main keyword page. Now normally you’re gonna go with this “Descriptive words or phrases”, but take a look at this real quick…”Website content”.

If you click on that, you can type in your web site address and Google will go and scan your web site real quick and then give you some keyword suggestions based on what it finds there.

Now that’s pretty powerful but think about this…you can type in your competitors….(my chair is squeaking)…you can type in your competitors address and Google will scan THAT web site and give you a bunch of keyword suggestions and tell you what it thinks, you know, that web site should be listed under which is just HUGE.

That’s some pretty awesome competitive intelligence, competitive research there but today we’re gonna go with “Descriptive words or phrases”.

And we just type it in there…(German Shepherd Dog Training) that’s my default testing search.

Make sure this “Use Synonyms” is clicked, you want that, and you can filter your results based on…you can get the porn out and whatnot but you usually don’t have to worry about that.

Click this button…

Now usually there’s a little captcha there that you have to type in so that Google knows you’re a person and not a computer but I’ve already been here today so I didn’t have to do that.

So, here we are…here you have your keywords, number of searches, Advertiser competition…now you can sort by any one of these just by clicking on them.

“Sort by relevance” that’s a good one to sort for, but we’ll just make sure “Global Monthly Searches” is clicked. And that’s from highest to lowest…

Now 4,400 that’s pretty bad for German Shepherd Dog Training so…

I should say, this first list here is a list of keywords that are made up of the same words that you typed in. So its just like the same words re-arranged in different order “German Shepherd Dog Training” you know, “Training German Shepherd” you know it just sort of re-arranges the words.

And that’s good, but what’s even more important and more powerful is this “Additional Keywords” right here. This is keywords that are related to your keyword but not necessarily the same keyword.

So you see like “Puppy training” and “German Shepherd Puppies” and “Dog Obedience” that relates to dog training…

So you can get some really great ideas here, and I think Google puts more weight behind these kind of keywords (second list) then it does these (first list) its part of their algorithm for ranking - we think.

So look down the list and you can get all kinds of ideas but take a look at this one “Training German Shepherd” now it gets 33,000 searches every month.

Now “Training German Shepherd”, that’s pretty much the same as “German Shepherd Dog Training”, so since this first keyword was so bad, it only got 4,400…we’ll just go ahead and erase that and run the search again with “Training German Shepherd”…and let’s see what the juggling balls bring us…

4,400 but see there’s a LOT more of these sort of ‘thousand’ searches, go through the list and see there’s a lot more this time in the first list.

And here’s the second list of additional ones…you can look through…and that’s pretty much it. Just look through there and get all kinds of ideas.

Now…this is cool but whats even cooler is integrating it with Google Docs. Now you use…there’s all kinds of Google Docs but for this we’re gonna use a spreadsheet. And if you’re familiar with spreadsheets that’s great, but if not you should really take the time to learn because if you’re gonna be in SEO you’re gonna use the crap out of spreadsheets. They’re just so useful.

And in this case you can see there at the bottom of the list this little option right here to export it as a text file, or this csv for excel, or just your basic csv file.

CSV is the file format for spreadsheets. So anyway…first of all, we want to save this to our desktop. Save it as…lets name this GermanShepherd. Is that how you spell Shepherd?

And now you want to head back over to Google, and sign into your Google Account. Then hit “settings”. Now if you’ve already installed Google Docs it will be listed here. If not, just go to this “More” button and click on “Docs” and that’s all you have to do…it will pop it right in.

So you click “Docs” and this is Google Docs. It’s pretty straight forward. Now “Create a new spreadsheet”. Then click “File > Open” and find the file you just saved to your desktop…And here it is.

You can double click these fields right here to make the columns bigger, make it look better. Adjust to preference. So here we have our keywords and advertiser competition and…oops, make that bold so we can see it better. Basically I’m just playing right now…

There we go…OK…So! What you see here is what you saw earlier at the keyword tool but now its in spreadsheet format.

So you can go through here and sort of clean this up a little bit. And say…ok, these are good, these are good, ah, that’s no good so you delete that one. Then delete that one…etc.

And, well you get the idea. You can just sort of come through here and play around with it.

Now…SO WHAT? you say…

Well, Google Docs stores everything online so where ever you’re at you can log in and check this spreadsheet. Or your employees can do it, or a partner, or anybody from around the world can log in here…Say you hire an SEO consultant and you want to show them your keyword file, BANG they can log right in and look.

And you want to keep a file like this and you always want to keep adding different keywords because everything you do in SEO revolves around this keyword file that you’re gonna create. Everytime you write an article, say, for your web site and you want to know what to name the article, well you come into your keyword spreadsheet file and you start looking through here and you find a phrase that’s sort of related to the article and you can look and see it gets searched 2,900 times and you make that your title.

Or…you know…whatever. Whenever you’re optimizing a web site or a certain page on your web site, you always check your keyword spreadsheet that you’ve just created here.

And uh, it’s just incredibly incredibly useful so I suggest you always keep your keyword file and you’re always adding to it and you’re always keeping it up to date and adding things and removing things and it will really be worth its weight in gold.

So, I think that’s all for this…yep.

That’s all for this week…be sure to watch past episodes and subscribe for free to my weekly seo show at seoFool.com and download my free beginners guide to seo eBook there as well, or follow me at facebook.com/seoFool or twitter.com/seoFool I’m John Elder, thanks for watchin and See you next Week!