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joe90 · by **joe90** on Tue Nov 18, 2008 4:57 pm

Keyword Research Introduction

What is a keyword? It's anything people type into a search engine. It could be made up of one
word or several keyword phrases joined together. Every person uses their own method of
searching, and that makes anticipating those keywords that will connect their websites with
the right visitors very difficult. Keyword research starts with the understanding that
finding lots of related keywords that deliver targeted traffic is the ultimate goal of any keyword
research.

Sending thousands of visitors to a site who have no interest in your product let alone buy is
just wasted effort and doesn't do any good for your business. If possible, we want to find the
customer who has a clear knowledge of what they want and is close to buying something soon.
We would rather want a few visitors who are seriously looking to buy in the near future.
In order to achieve this, we want to find the least competitive keywords with thehighest number
of searches that are the most relevant to our website.

We are asked this question several times, “Is it better to rank for one very popular search term
or attain top ranking for more keywords with less searches. Which is the better route”? This
depends entirely on your website's theme and how many search terms visitors can use to find
the same information. If you are just starting out, it definitely would be to your advantage to
target lower competition terms. Having success with low competition terms will lead to increased
confidence to target more competitive terms with higher search volumes.

Thinking like your customers

Thinking like your customers is easier said than done.

All merchants are guilty of thinking in terms of features and specs of the products and not
thinking in terms of benefits it can provide to the customers.

You know your business and market too well. The industry jargons and slang are
in your every day language. No wonder when you start your keyword research you have a very
narrow keyword focus. You become your own worst enemy in exploring other ideas.

Here is an example: when people search for getting their site ranked higher on the search
engines, they may look for anything from "web promotion" to "web ranking,” or even "web
traffic.” "SEO software" could be the last thing on their mind, but yet we would bet our business
on "SEO software" being the best keyword for our site to target. Here is another example: what
is the most popular search term, "cheap flights,” "cheap seats,” "low fares" or "discount fares"?

As you can see it's not that simple to pick the best keywords, is it?

The hardest part of keyword research is to keep an open mind about all possible search methods
people might use to look for the same thing. Keyword research is part science, part intuition, and
imagination. Since we can't get into the heads of every possible potential visitor to your site who
may be interested in your products or services, we have to rely on keyword research tools to tell
us what people actually search for and how often. There are a handful of very powerful keyword
research tools that are worth using, but the amount of information you can mine from them is
mind boggling.

Another great resource for proven keywords is to look at your competitor’s website. We are
talking about finding the highest ranking competitors on the search engines using your target
keywords. Once you find the top 5–10 competitor sites, perform a quick review of their keywords
on the web pages. This can be a lengthy and slow process, but luckily the SEO Studio Keyword
Analyzer tool can dig up keywords from your competitor’s sites in a snap. We'll cover in detail
how the Keyword Analyzer can be used to add hundreds of keywords to your keyword research
project.

Keyword research is like a job interview process

In order to find the right candidate you may need to interview hundreds of applicants to find the
perfect fit for the job. Well, the keyword research process is very similar; you have to cast a wide
net first to capture all the possible combinations of keywords known to man. Even then, it's
almost guaranteed you will discover new keywords you have missed in the original research only
a few weeks earlier. What this tells us is the keyword selection and refinement process never
ends, or at least it should not end until you are happy with the number of visitors you are
receiving to your site.

Where and how to look for keywords

In order to find the best keywords for our website we need to gather information from a variety
of resources. Some of these resources may include:

Brainstorming: Getting your brain to go on a magic carpet ride is one of the best
to find relevant keywords for your website. Don't just settle for asking the obvious
question, what does my website sell? Ask questions such as: "What is this product
made up of?" or "Who is using my services?,”or "What problems my products solve?"

Paid keyword research tools: These include Wordtracker , Keyword Discovery ,
Keywords Analyzer , and Wordze . They give you the crucial keyword popularity data
that is necessary for any keyword research. . All of these are very powerful keyword
research tools, but they can be very expensive unless you do keyword research for a
number of websites and you get paid for the work. We would recommend trying the
free editions of the Free Wordtracker , and the Free Keyword Discovery tool before
putting some serious money down for their paid editions. If you do decide to sign up
for the paid version, you will most likely not need more than a month long membership.
Finding the main and secondary keyword phrases should take less than a month for
even 2 or 3 websites. This does not mean your keyword research has ended forever,
but finding the 4-5 word long secondary key phrases can be done with the free
keyword research tools if your budget is tight.

Free keyword research tools: You can gain access to the powerful and free Google
external keyword tool to expand your keyword list. Unfortunately the Google external
keyword tool only gives a search volume indicator instead of the actual search
numbers. Another very valuable feature in Google external keyword tool is the
"Site-Related Keywords" finder. By simply entering the website URL of your
competitors, you can find out in seconds which keywords they target on their web
pages. Another free keyword research tool available without creating an account is
the Overture keyword inventory . As of now, August 2007 this tool only shows the
January 2007 search volumes as it's being phased out, but Yahoo! is promising a
replacement. If you have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account you can still gain access
to their keyword tool albeit without the search volume numbers.

Use pay per click (PPC) advertising: This will assist you in finding and selecting the
best performing keywords based on the click through rate (CTR) and conversion rates.
This is one of the fastest and most effective ways to select relevant keywords since
your target audience is already casting their votes in the forms of clicks for your site.
Testing new keywords with PPC is a very effective and low cost method to validate
new keywords before incorporating them into your web page.

Ask your friends and colleagues: Although you may be the expert in your field and
perfectly capable of describing your products and services, you may also have a
narrow focus when it comes to selecting the best keywords for your website. People
who know much less about your business can give you important clues as to how they
would look for your products or services.

Related search terms suggestion tools: One of the fastest ways you can find
hundreds of related keywords is to use online lexical or thesaurus tools. Creating a
large initial keyword list that includes a large number of synonyms and acronyms is
essential to effective keyword research. Discovering related phrases that are not
simply stemming from the original keyword term is a cornerstone of semantic latent
indexing . Semantic indexing can be described as the grouping of related documents
based on not only direct relationship between words, but the meaning of the words as
well. For example a computer shopper typing "apple" into the Google search box
expects to see Apple computer in the results, but someone interested in finding
information on the fruit apple, expects to find information on different varieties of
apples and apple growers. It's the semantic latent indexing that helps connect
documents to the correct meaning of the search results and it's believed to be widely
used by Google.

Some of the search engines provide a related search command list in their search
results. Try Clusty by entering a search command and take a look at the "clusters"
side bar. You can get dozens of ideas from the keyword clusters by playing with
different combination of keywords. You can also visit Technorati a well known blog
aggregator and social media tagging site to help unlocked your brain and generate
new keywords. Enter a search term and observe the "Related tags" section directly
under the search results.

Visitor statistic reports: These can be generated from web server log files or from
script based visitor statistic programs. This can help you uncover new keywords for
your website by discovering what the visitors are typing into the search engines to find
your websites. In some cases, you'll find keywords you didn't expect to come up for in
the search results. You should further research those keywords and uncover new
keyword niches.

Regional keywords and dialects: This can increase your website relevancy to visitors
by using keywords as geographical filters. There can be variations of keywords from
country to county even in the English speaking world. For example, in North America,
we may use the term "search engine optimization" but in the UK and Australia most
web searchers will be using "search engine optimisation."

Misspellings, hyphenated and plural: These keywords can give you a multitude of
additional keywords to target. Search engines can suggest the correctly spelled or
hyphenated keywords in response to your query request, but they can not change
what people actually search for. For this reason, focusing on even a few misspelled
keywords or plural keyword variations can bring a few hundred extra visitors to your
website every month.

Site search engines: This can be a great source of new keywords and a potential data
mining source. As well as further analysis of the average number of keywords,
keyword length and other important keyword metrics.

Top ranking competitors: These websites are already well optimized and contain
keyword rich web pages. Why not leverage their efforts and harvest the best
keywords for your own website? With the help of the SEO Studio keyword analyzer
you can extract hundreds of keywords from their META keywords and HTML page
content in seconds.

A few examples of good keywords selection practices

Selecting the best keyword takes experience and little know how, but it's always helpful to see
how the pros do it, so here are few basic steps for keyword selection.

Using your favorite keyword research tool Wordtracker , Keyword Discovery or
the Keywords Analyzer , type in the main keyword phrase. Start with the broadest
possible search terms, this way there is less chance of missing keywords that might
otherwise be overlooked.

Look for 2-4 word key phrases that have at least a daily search volume of 200 or
more. Since the top 3 sites will receive 60%-80% of all searches, it follows you can
expect at least 120 or more unique visitors for those keywords phrases. In some
cases, you may want to lower the minimum search volume threshold to as low as 50 if
the search term is well targeted for your business.

At this point you should have at least 20-30 really good secondary keywords in
your basket.

Hopefully most of the keywords you have selected will have little competition.
Some of the keyword tools we have recommended will also tell you the amount of
competition for each keyword, but you can also verify these numbers manually by
typing the search terms into the search engines with quotes.

It's very important that you use quotes around the keywords to let the engines know
you are looking for an exact match. The rule of thumb we use to assess keyword
competitiveness is around "100,000" websites. Anything above a hundred thousand
results is fairly competitive and requires a fair amount of optimization and link building.

Website Promotion|SEO|Free Targeted Traffic|Massive Backlinks|Discussion Forum|Learn Website Promotion|SEO

How to Begin Your Keyword Research

How to Begin Your Keyword Research

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