Keyword Research
Keyword research should be the first thing you do before you go creating a new web page or even website (especially if you?re going to be targeting a specific niche). Keyword research is essentially the process of finding keywords that are worth targeting. If you haven?t already read through the Internet Marketing Tools page then please take a quick look over there as you?ll need SeoQuake or a similar program to analyze some of the websites you?ll be checking out.
The first thing you?re going to need to do is decide what exactly you?re going to use to look up keywords. There are a number of programs like Market Samurai you can use but I prefer to just use Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It?s free, easy to use, and what I?ll be referring to in this process.
Now I hope you have an idea of what you want to base your website around and what sort of website you want to build. Let?s just use internet marketing as an example. If you?re looking to build a large website, cover as much about internet marketing as possible, and brand your website (make a name for yourself) then you?re probably going to want to use a fairly broad keyword like ?internet marketing? or ?internet marketing info.? Broad keywords get more monthly searches but also have more competition. If you want to build a niche site then you need to pick something specific about internet marketing and use a long tail keyword (generally a keyword this is more than 3-4 words long). Let?s say you?ve chosen to cover link building for new companies. An easy keyword to do some keyword research on would be ?link building for new companies? because it?s very specific and will have less competition that ?link building? or similar keywords (of course it will get less traffic, but your traffic will be far more targeted).
With a general idea for a keyword in mind, go ahead and open up the Adwords Keyword Tool (or keyword research tool of your choice). Enter your idea for a keyword and submit it then set your search settings for [Exact]. You want to see exactly how many searches there are monthly for your keyword, not how many there are with the words included somewhere in the search. If you?re going to use Google Adsense on your website, turn on the option to see what advertisers are generally paying per click for your possible keyword (you won?t get paid that exact amount -usually quite a bit lower since Google takes a cut- but it will give you a good look at whether you?ll get paid a decent amount or 1 cent per click).
Now you?re looking at a whole bunch of numbers and they probably don?t make a whole lot of sense. So here?s what you should be focusing on:
* Global Monthly Searches: A rough idea of how many times the keyword is searched for monthly
* Local Search Trends: How much the search amounts fluctuate throughout the month
* CPC: Cost per click. This is roughly how much advertisers are paying per click
* Competition: How much competition there is between advertisers for this keyword
If your keyword has at least 2000 exact monthly searches and is paying more than $0.05 per click (if you?re using Adsense) then open up Google and do an exact search for you keyword (use [your_keyword] for your search). Under the search bar you?ll see how many sites are competing for that exact keyword. You?ll hear a lot of people talk about trying to get a keyword with as few competing pages as possible, but I would only recommend that if you?re building a niche site that you don?t want to work very hard to rank. I personally don?t pay much attention to the amount of competing pages because if there are 200,000,000 pages competing, then there are 199,999,990 pages that I don?t care one bit about.
What I recommend is concerning yourself with is the first 10 results. This is where you?re going to need SeoQuake (or your keyword research tool of choice). Click the little icon in the bottom right site of your browser and refresh your page. You?ll get a whole bunch bars under the search results. Sometimes they?ll be filled with ??? so you may have to click on those to show the numbers. Again, you?re going to be bombarded numbers that don?t make any sense so here?s a quick breakdown of what you need to be looking at:
* Google PR: This is the Page Rank of the website
* Yahoo L: This is roughly how many links are indexed to that specific page
* Yahoo LD: This is roughly how many links are indexed to that domain (all pages)
* Age: When the site was created
* Robo: Yes/No if the site has a robot.txt file
* Sitemap: Yes/No if the site has a site map
* Density: Keyword density of that specific page (you don?t really need to look at this if you don?t want to)
-The only time you should really concern yourself with the Google PR is if it is over 6, otherwise it?s nothing special.
-Yahoo L is one of your main concerns because this tells you roughly how many backlinks are already indexed for that page and how much catching up you?ll need to do. Yahoo LD is similar, but don?t worry about that too much. You?re not looking to beat the entire site, just the page that is ranking in the search results.
-Age is fairly important. Google (and some other search engines) give older sites a bonus just for having some age. Sites that are 2-3 years old are not getting a huge bonus yet. If a site is 10+ years older, it is going to be getting a nice bonus from that.
-Robo is short for robot.txt which is a file that tells robots whether or not they?re allowed to crawl your site. Good robots will follow the instructions and do as their told. Bad robots will ignore their instructions and do what they want. So this file doesn?t always work, but if you?re using WordPress then there are plugins to add this file so I always add it to my sites and hope most robots will obey.
-Sitemaps help robots get through your site quickly and easily. This is very important for SEO. If a site doesn?t have a sitemap, consider it prey.
-Density will show you the density of the words on the page. If a website has certain words with higher densities than others, then they?re probably targeting those keywords. If their densities are all fairly even then you may be able to get the upper hand on them.
Now you?ve had a good look at monthly searches, number of competing pages, and your competition. At this point it is entirely up to you to decide whether or not you want to take on your chosen keyword or keep looking for a keyword. If your competition doesn?t look too difficult, then keep on reading. If your competition looks like more than you want to tackle, look for another keyword and repeat the Keyword research process.
Hopefully this process wasn?t too painful because you?ll need to do this again for every page you create. If it was painful, suck it up because keyword research is a vital part of internet marketing.
Bloggers who are trying to find more information about the niche of one way links, make sure to check out the link that is quoted right in this line.
