Keywords are a very important part of any Search Engine Optimization campaign. You should certainly use them, but have you given much thought to how often they should be changed?

As you can imagine, search behavior changes over time. Popular search terms one month may be less popular the next month and new terms come up all the time. Because of this, you should consider looking at your keyword strategy every month or two. While Google and the other search engines crawl your site every few days or so, they are mostly looking for new content. That content is not added to the Google index as often. Sometime it takes up to a month for new content to become searchable. Changing keywords more often would not necessarily mean that your content is updated with those new keywords in the index. And quite often one month is not enough time to accurately monitor how successful a keyword is.

How Do You Monitor Your Keywords?

By examining your referrer logs you can see what keywords people are using to find your site. The referrer logs are provided by most web hosting companies. Some of course give more detailed information than others but there are also third-party logging tools that are available. Getting this information is very important in being able to monitor how and how many people are finding your site. You can also use Google Analytics to find the keywords that are leading users to your pages.

The referrer logs and analytics can indicate how people are finding you, but the hard part is coming up new keywords to try. One tool that can help with this is Google Trends, which can be found at http://www.google.com/trends. This tool can show you what search terms are currently popular. There is also http://www.google.com/insights/search/ which shows search terms, locations and time ranges of searches.

The combination of monitoring your visitors and how they find you, as well as keeping up on possible new terms can be the difference between having your keywords “go stale” on you, and keeping them fresh and current with what your users are searching for.