Saturday, November 22, 2008

What To Look For With Keyword Marketing Research

By Brian Armstrong

Just about any of your internet marketing efforts begin with finding keywords that people are actually searching for that you can use to get traffic. One of the most solid ways to get visitors to your website is through the search engines.

Start your research by brainstorming a list of keyword phrases that match what your website will be about or what you believe people are searching for when you want them to find your website. I've found that using a spreadsheet is the best way to keep track of your keywords. If you don't currently own Microsoft Office, you can use Google Docs or OpenOffice.

Once you've found most of the broad keywords, organize them into groups or categories and then find other keyword phrases that make that original keyword phrase more specific and indicate people that are doing the search are more likely to buy vs. those that are simply looking. If you are trying to sell a Nikon camera, you may want to include a specific model type or feature of the camera people will be searching for. Every additional detail someone types in the search engine usually indicates individuals being much closer to making a purchase.

With any of these keyword phrases that you've found, you'll need to determine how many monthly searches are done so you know which of these keyword phrases will be worth going for. Two great tools for doing this are the Google Adwords keyword tool and the free keyword tool at freekeywords.wordtracker.com.

When you have data about how many searches get done on these keywords, you'll need to cross reference the competition. You'll need to know how many other websites there are on the internet that contain your keyword phrase. Google has in its index a lot of websites and you'll be able to get some data on how many pages Google has where your keyword phrases are being used.

There are some search parameters that you can use, especially with Google that will give you some indications of how much competition there really is for these keyword phrases. If you do searches with the allintitle or allinanchor options with your keyword phrases, you'll have an especially good idea of which of those keyword phrases you should go after with your website.

When evaluating which keywords are "good" keywords or good keyword phrases, you can usually tell after you've been doing this a while. I usually start with keyword phrases that get at least 100 searches per day. Obviously the more searches per day, the better. As far as competition, I usually look for keyword phrases with less than 10,000 allintitle results. The lower the competition, the better.

Now that you have your keywords, you'll need to use those strategically on your website or your web pages so that you can get ranked in the search engines. Plan on using your keyword phrases in the title of the page, in the heading or h1 tags and then again as content in the page itself, usually about 3-6% "keyword density". After you've done this, work on getting some back links to your site, some links from other websites, such as social bookmarking sites. Obviously there's much more to getting backlinks and the other SEO components of what to do once you have your keywords. This is just the beginning. Good luck! - 15478

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