As well as using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to identify keyword combinations for use with pay per click advertising, it can also be used to determine appropriate keywords to use on your website and as anchor text for on-site links and off-site backlinks.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool can be used to check the popularity of any keyword combination. Keywords that have less than 8,000 hits per month are probably not worth using as keywords on your website or for SEO. There is, of course, a balance between going after the large markets - where competition is fierce - and being too restrictive in your keywords niche which will limit sales potential.

To illustrate how the Google AdWords Keyword Tool findings can be applied to SEO in practice, let us imagine that you are researching van insurance keywords for a (UK-based) website. You enter 'van insurance' into the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and look for keywords that score over 8,000 hits per month. Numbers vary from month to month, but on doing that at the time of writing, the following keywords had over 8,000 hits per month: (The numbers are the hits per month)

• van insurance - 110,000

• van cheap insurance – 14,800

• van insurance uk – 8,100

• commercial van insurance – 9,900

Given that 'van cheap insurance' is difficult to incorperate into your page content for adequate keyword density, a check of 'cheap van insurance' on the Google AdWords Keyword Tool confirms that this more natural word order also scores 14,800. This means that you can optimize your site for 'cheap van insurance' instead. You can try this approach for any unnatural keyword order, it usually works and it is valid.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool also gives you information about how much advertiser competition there is for the listed keywords. If you can identify keyword(s) that score(s) over 8,000 hits per month but do not have very high advertiser competition, then that rare occurence is an important keyword to target. Note that advertiser competition is a marker of the intensity of keyword competion for organic searches too.

It can be seen from the above example that the affiliate would be wise to select 'cheap van insurance', 'van insurance UK' (upper or lower case are interchangeable) and 'commercial van insurance' as the best keywords to pursue.

Should he ignore 'van insurance' then? No. But it will be much easier to get traffic to his website with the less popular keywords because competiton for ‘van insurance will be fierce.

By using this methodology, the affiliate will know which keywords to use at around 4% density on his pages, varying the choice of keywords for each page, consistent with the page utility and content. When setting up backlinks from external sites for search engine optimization purposes the identified keywords should be used as anchor text, while the ‘less ambitious’ keywords should be favoured.

Targeting search engine optimization activities at ‘van insurance’ will put him in direct competition with the big insurance providers with the result that effective SEO would involve establishing several thousand more backlinks for ‘van insurance’ than would be required for the three ‘less ambitious’ keywords.

Dependant on the size of the market sector, variation of the cut-off for keyword popularity may be necessary. The suggested 8,000 might, for example, become 6,000 (or less) for a less competitive sector than van insurance.