Google has released a new “guide to keywords” for AdWords advertisers. It includes best practices for keyword targeting in search campaigns.

“As people search for things on Google, advertisers target those searches, or queries, using keywords,” says Matt Lawson, Director of Performance Ads Marketing at Google. “The relationship between queries and keywords is at the heart of search advertising with AdWords.”

Lawson writes, “Do you target the meaning of a user’s search, in addition to the language a user may or may not be using? Are your long tail keywords too long? What opportunities for expansion are you missing out on in your account? How diligent are you with your negative keywords, and do you understand the ways in which their matching behavior differs from positive keywords?”

These are the kinds of topics you can expect to find.

The guide is broken down into these sections: Align Keywords with Your Business Goals, Manage Match Types for Growth and Control, Find New Targeting Opportunities, Expand the Reach of Existing Keywords, and Refine Your Traffic with Negative Keywords.

You can grab the whole white paper here. It’s called “Keywords to the Wise,” by the way, and is twelve pages long.

Image via Google