Lots of discussion this week about Google Caffeine and the impact that it will have on search results. There is a useful post by Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer.

Back links are one part of the search equation. Keywords are another.

Here are a few tools for assessing keyword density and usage. They can help you analyse your competitors (i.e. the people that rank higher than you) and inform your own keyword strategy. Thanks to @jimboot for some of these tips – Jim puts out a series of very useful search videos, which can be found on YouTube.

Here goes:

• To understand what the most often used keywords within a specific website use TagCrowd. This can help you identify the words that are ranking for a competitive site.
• For a different angle on keyword density use Keyword Counter.  You can run an analysis of an entire website.
• For identifying related keywords use the Google Wonder wheel, which can be found in the left hand options column on any Google search results page. The Wonder wheel link can be found under ‘Standard View’. It creates a clickable spider diagram of keywords related to your original search term.
• To check comparative results in the hottest search engines go to Bing vs. Google. Pre-Caffeine results.
• The Google sandbox for running test searches against the new Caffeine code.

There are a plethora of tools for analysing and optimising keywords, we use Keyword Discovery and have trialled Market Samurai.