Beginners to optimizing their website pages for keywords, soon find themselves overwhelmed by the enormous variety of phrases, synonyms, and abbreviations that folks use to search for products.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of optimizing for the same keywords over and over, and that’s a wasted opportunity to show up in more search results and attract more visitors.

The solution is to set up a spreadsheet to track keywords. There you will record which keywords you used, on which pages, and how many times.

Here’s what one might look like.

The large X denotes that the keyword was used in the headline. The smaller x’s denote the number of times the keyword appears on the page. Warning: If your keyword appears in an image file, do not count it, unless you write an alternate tag with the keyword in it.

Also, simply track the keywords you specifically designated for the page. Other keywords may naturally appear in the writing. Don’t worry about tracking those on this sheet.

Be sure to include your designated keywords in your title tags.

Easy Web Tip #157: To keep track of the terms you are using on your web pages, track keywords by using a simple spreadsheet.

P.S. Since this web tip was written, Google has revised how they report average monthly searches. The numbers above are radically lower in actuality. I have also revised the way I record how I have embedded keywords. Instead of Xxxx, I do 1T 1D 1H 3B 1F (that is once in title tag, once in description tag, once in headline, three times in body copy, and once in footer).