For Keyword Research

The most valuable use of AdWords for SEO is to research keywords. Keywords are the basis of any SEO campaign and even if you are an expert in your niche, you should always research keywords simply because users frequently search for quite unexpected keywords and keyphrases you as an expert will never think of. Needless to say, what matters most for high rankings is which keywords your target audience is searching for, not which keywords you as an expert think are most popular in a particular niche.
It is simple to use AdWords to research keywords. You can either enter the URL of your site or put in some seed keywords, the tool will then automatically generate a whole bunch of suggested keywords. Look at the results and shortlist all the keywords that seem relevent and have a decent global search volume.
You may want to rank well for ALL the generated keywords, but its best to focus all your efforts on a selected few. The idea now is to find keywords that are relatively easy to optimize and yet have a decent search volume. These would be the keywords with the least compitetion in Google. Go to Google.com and enter each of your short listed keywords (one at a time). It is best if you search for the exact phrase, so surround your keyword with double quotes. Note how many web results there are for each of the phrases. Now that you have collected the 'Number of web results' for each keyword, calculate competition ratio by divding it's 'Global search volume' by the 'Number of web results'. The keywords with the higher ratios are the easier ones to optimize.

You can now start a SEO campaign for your keywords however you'll see next, it might be much wiser to start an AdWords campaign instead.

HOW TO: Boost Your SEO with a YouTube Channel

Mitchell Harper is co-founder of BigCommerce, a leading provider of shopping cart software used by more than 40,000 organizations worldwide. Mitchell has written and published over 300 articles relating to software development, marketing, business, social media and entrepreneurship.

While many companies are still focusing SEO efforts on their websites, there are many other ways to boost search results, especially since results are now comprised of all kinds of content, including videos, images, maps, business listings, tweets and even Facebook (Facebook) Page posts.

So how do you expand your efforts without breaking the bank? To boost SEO, consider creating a YouTube (YouTube) channel. Every video you post to your channel can be tagged and indexed, increasing the odds your brand name will appear in natural searches for keywords associated with your business.

Creating your own channel is pretty simple — here are four easy steps to kick things off right.

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