Note: When I talk about keywords I really mean “keyword phrases” because in most cases you will be working with two to four word phrases as your keywords.
The keywords you target will have a big impact on the search engine rankings you obtain and the traffic you get. Your keywords must be relevant to the content of your pages. If you have a page on your site about green widgets you don’t want to try to optimize that page for the term red widgets.
There are two important aspects of keyword research you need to consider. Once you have in your mind the kind of keywords that are relevant to your page, you need to consider how many people search for the keywords and how much competition there is for the keywords.
It is useless to optimize for keywords that no one searches for. You need a way to get an idea of how many searches per month are done for your selected keyword phrase. Fortunately, there is a great free tool from Google AdWords that you can use. You can even enter the URL of the page you want to target and the tool will suggest keywords.
The other side of the keyword selection coin will determine how hard it will be to rank for your chosen keyword phrase. You can get and estimate of how many Web sites are competing for the same keywords.
The easiest free way to gauge competition is to do a search on Google for your phrase and place quotes around it to specify the exact phrase. If there are hundreds of thousands of pages found you will want to choose a less competitive keyword phrase. If there are 10,000 or less results you will probably be able to rank for it.
There is actually a more accurate way to gauge competition. I’ll save that for the newsletter lessons and a future blog post. I’m keeping this to simpler, but still very effective methods.
Golden Take-Away: Keywords are very important. You should spend time learning to do good keyword research. I will be teaching the details of doing fast but thorough keyword research in the newsletter. For now the information above will get you a good start.
If you want a real powerhouse site for search engine ranking then choose a primary keyword phrase that has a high search volume but reasonable competition. Then use the Google Keyword Tool to find a couple dozen related keywords and start building your site targeting one of those keywords for each page.
Try to get a domain name that contains your main keyword phrase. This will help greatly in your SEO efforts.
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