Understanding Keyword Research
April 11th, 2010
Whenever you’re discussing Search engine optimization you should begin with keyword research due to the fact that any time you don’t get this right everything else is going to be off as well. I can’t stress this strongly enough- if you foul up your keyword research you’ll be unsuccessful, do it properly and everything else is a piece of cake.You really can learn SEO.
If you are not familiar with keywords they are the words or phrases people type into the search engines to find what they are looking for. When I use “keyword” in this article it will refer to both individual keywords and keyword phrases.
In order to do your keyword research you are going to need to use keyword tools that run from free to expensive. The free one to use is Google Adwords keyword tool you can search for it on Google. If you can afford it I use, and would recommend, Market Samurai. As I’m writing this it’s $149 and there is a free trail. Another good one (I’ve heard) is Keyword Elite. I also use Micro Niche Finder but only for quick research. You need more detail on your competition than it can provide. I would not recommend it as your only tool.
As you do your SEO keyword research there are two factors to take into consideration: a) Is there enough traffic for the keyword to be worth while and, b) the level of competition. Lets look at traffic first.
This point right here can save you a lot of headaches- always do your research in exact match. Both phrase match and broad match will not tell you the actual traffic a keyword receives, only exact match. For myself I never go after a keyword unless there is at the very least one hundred searches per day in exact match. This of course is just the low end and doesn’t mean you should not try to find keywords with more traffic.
Now let’s talk about SEO competition. This is where Market Samurai can save you a lot of time and effort. You need to look at the sites that are showing on the first page of Google to determine how hard or easy it will be to rank for your keyword.
Some say all you need to do is search for you keyword in quotes and if the number of sites returned is under a certain amount you are good to go. This may be true it may not be. If there are only 100 sites returned and 25 of them are high Page Rank sites with thousands of good anchor-text one way back links and all have good on-page optimization do you think it will be easy to get on the first page? It’s work but do your competion analysis the right way.
The most important factor when analyzing the sites already on the first page is links (to the page not the site) and the anchor text for those links. After that you’ll want to look at on-page factors, page rank and .edu/.gov links. I really can’t get into numbers here because you can rank for anything, it just depends on how hard you are willing to work. Let’s just say if they have not worked all that hard you won’t have to either. Go here for more SEO help.