All SEO work for a website should start off with keyword research. You need to find out what keywords people in your industry/niche are actually typing into the search engines to find a solution to their problem. What you think people are typing in and what they are actually typing in might be completely different.
Now there’s a few paid services out there like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, but there’s also a great little free utility you can get from http://www.goodkeywords.com. Install and run the tool, enter your main keyword phrase like Search Engine Marketing. This is referred to as your seed phrase or seed keyword. GoodKeywords will now bring you back multiple suggestions that contain or are related to your seed keyword.
Along with keyword suggestions, GoodKeywords will also show you how many people are typing that keyword phrase into Overture (now know as Yahoo Search Marketing) on a monthly basis. This will give you an idea of the search volume for that particular keyword(s). For example if you was to type Search Engine Marketing into Google you would get around 53,000,000 results. As you can see this isn’t something you would want to optimize for due to the amount of competition. So as well as looking for volume, make sure you enter the values into Google to see how much competition there is. These higher volume keywords are not out of reach, but I would recommend going for the long tail keywords. By this I mean phrases that contain 3, 4 or more keywords. These results can then be recorded in a spreadsheet.
There are tools that will do this for you, like Wordtracker, but you will have to pay for these. Personally I do use Wordtracker but that’s because I can offset the cost against what I’m earning through my various Internet Marketing Ventures. Plus I tend to use a mixture of keyword resources from various sources to maximise my exposure. And you’ll be pleased to know that I’ll be revealing them all to you in this blog.
Another very useful technique used in keyword research is misspelled words. These can be little nuggets of traffic as a huge amount of people often mistype when entering their search phrase into search engines. However, you have to be careful when using these in your website content. I’ll come onto how you can use these more in future postings. GoodKeywords has a facility within it that will give you common misspellings of any search phrase you enter.
Once you’ve decided on what keywords have good search volume and a reasonable amount of competition save these in a document as your master keyword list. These will be used throughout your site and will be the basis of you SEO efforts. This is very basic keyword research but i’ll be going a lot more in depth looking at techniques like LSI in future posts. Bye for now..
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