Keyword Research For SEO
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.
For those who are unfamiliar with keyword phrases these are the words and phrases folks put in the search box of Google or another engine to locate the things they are trying to find. Any time I use “keyword” here it’s going to mean both single keywords as well as keyword phrases.
To carry out your keyword research you will definitely want to use keyword software which can be 100 % free to over $100. If you are short on money use the Google keyword tool, just search for Google keyword tool in Google. If you’re able to find the money for it I go with, and would advocate using, Market Samurai. It is $149 (at the moment) and there’s a trial offer that will allow you to use for free (I’m not sure for how long). Yet another good choice (or so I have heard) is Keyword Elite. I additionally use Micro Niche Finder however I only use it for a fast recon. You require far more in-depth competion research than it can supply. I’d personally not recommend it as being your only software.
Just in case you are not aware of the two elements involved in keyword research for a SEO campaign they are traffic and competition. You will need to know if there is enough traffic for your keywords to be worth your efforts and also what level of competition you’ll be up against. The later can be especially important if you don’t have a lot of money to spend. So how much traffic is enough?
When talking about how much traffic you need for a keyword to be worth your time to go after I usually look for keywords with at least 100 searches a day or 3000 a month. This is IMPORTANT: These figures are for “exact match”! Always do keyword research in “exact match”, never in “phrase match” or God forbid “broad match”. There can be huge differences in the results you get and only “exact match”, as it’s name implies, tells you the exact number of searches a keyword phrase receives.
As for competition this is where the actual SEO comes into play and it will be up to you to decide what level of competition you are willing to go up against. You are going to need to analyze the sites that are on the first page of Google to determine the competitiveness of your chosen keyword, a good keyword tool will make this job much easier.
Don’t listen to those that say just do a search in quotes for your keyword and look for a certain number of sites being returned in the “out of X# of results” field. This does not give you enough information to truly determine the competition level as it only shows how many websites contain that phrase.
Here are the elements you need to consider: How many links do the top 10 sites have and what is the anchor text of those links (how many are .gov or .edu, Google loves these), this is greatest determining factor of where sites show up in the SERPs. Next look at Page Rank and domain age- The higher the page rank and older the domain the more Google will trust and value the site. Lastly look at on-page SEO factors like Title and Description Tags. Follow this for the best SEO course.
