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 researching 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 in buying it, 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.
Ideally, every webmaster wants visitors who are seriously looking to buy in the near future. In order to achieve this, you need to find the least competitive keywords with the highest number of searches that are the most relevant to your website.
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 terms and words 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: 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 there are free Keyword Analyzer tools that 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 radiate 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.
Tune in for Part II of keyword research.
Showing posts with label effective keyword research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label effective keyword research. Show all posts
Keyword Research
Keyword Research is the first important task in optimizing your web site and pay-per-click(PPC) campaign. You need to know what keywords your target group is using.
Your keywords are the words and phrases that people might use to find your products, brands, services, or information, via search engines.
Keyword Identification
The first step in keyword research is to identify keywords. Keyword identification is about finding the right keywords that your target group is using. You can probably develop a few ideas very quickly. If you run a pet shop, you may identify keywords such as: "dog food" and "cat food".
Find Keywords
The second step in your keyword research is to find keywords that people actually use and to organize your keywords by their popularity.
To find keywords and their popularities use the keyword search box from Aleksika to learn the search behavior of your audience. Find out what they call things, how they identify subjects, how precisely or broadly they generally search.
You can also get good keyword ideas from the top keywords collection that contains the top 100.000 keywords of the year or the keyword directory where you can find keywords organized by subject.
You can also use popular keyword research tool like wordtracker, keyword discovery and the likes.
Choose Keywords
You will have to choose keyword phrases that are most relevant to your Web site - two and three-words keyword phrases that best describe your products and services. Many searchers enter one-word queries into the search form but the chance of competing successfully for one-word search engine keywords is very hard. The number of competing websites is simply too high.
Instead of wasting your efforts on one word keywords, it is best to use or target long tail keywords which is more manageable, less competitive, and will surely provide you with positive results.
Your keywords are the words and phrases that people might use to find your products, brands, services, or information, via search engines.
Keyword Identification
The first step in keyword research is to identify keywords. Keyword identification is about finding the right keywords that your target group is using. You can probably develop a few ideas very quickly. If you run a pet shop, you may identify keywords such as: "dog food" and "cat food".
Find Keywords
The second step in your keyword research is to find keywords that people actually use and to organize your keywords by their popularity.
To find keywords and their popularities use the keyword search box from Aleksika to learn the search behavior of your audience. Find out what they call things, how they identify subjects, how precisely or broadly they generally search.
You can also get good keyword ideas from the top keywords collection that contains the top 100.000 keywords of the year or the keyword directory where you can find keywords organized by subject.
You can also use popular keyword research tool like wordtracker, keyword discovery and the likes.
Choose Keywords
You will have to choose keyword phrases that are most relevant to your Web site - two and three-words keyword phrases that best describe your products and services. Many searchers enter one-word queries into the search form but the chance of competing successfully for one-word search engine keywords is very hard. The number of competing websites is simply too high.
Instead of wasting your efforts on one word keywords, it is best to use or target long tail keywords which is more manageable, less competitive, and will surely provide you with positive results.
Good SEO Will Create Traffic to Your Website
To get the most out of your web site, it needs to get good web traffic, which means simply that a lot of people are coming to your web site. By checking your web stats, you can quickly observe how many visitors your web site is getting and even how many people stay long enough to browse the website.
Programs like Awstats, a web-analyzing program found on most Linux based servers will show you how those web visitors came to you. Did they click through from a search engine? If so, what keyword brought them to you? Or, did they come from a particular website that links to yours? Your stats will reveal all.
Are the keywords used by visitors who find your site through the search engines. In the past few years a new science called "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) has evolved into a business model that specializes in making sure your web site gets a strong flow of business from people looking for your niche of goods and services using Google, Yahoo or one of the other big search engines.
The key on getting traffic from search engines is your "search engine ranking". That all sounds very complicated but it isn't. When you search for something on the Internet, Google (or your favorite search engine) provides you with lots of web sites for you to consider. The search result that comes first are called the first page. And usually there are dozens of pages of web sites that the search engine shows you.
Well, experts tell us that the majority of web shoppers use a web site shown on that first page of links that the search engine returns. So if your web site is among that first one or two pages, you have a good search engine ranking and you will see more customers than a business that is way down on page 54 where customers never go. One of the primary ways to get on that first page is by using good SEO.
SEO is the science of effective research and implementation with search engines so your web site gets a good ranking. SEO is also a fairly complicated science because it involves how your web site is programmed, the kind of text you have on each page and a good SEO expert has specialized tools and software to monitor your SEO on a daily basis to see how you are doing.
So how can we improve our web site's SEO? If you go talk to your web programmers, they will be aware of the terms we learned here today but they may not be equipped to do a professional job of improving your SEO. That is why most businesses that do well at improving SEO for their web sites do so using a professional outsourcing company that specializes in this kind of thing. There are good reasons for you to outsource this function as well.
An SEO company will have those specialized tools and software resources to do the job right. They understand how search engines work and they can prepare specific suggestions to your web team to improve your search engine ranking. And they can employ internet traffic specialists who have that expertise to take your web site from where it is and turn it into a successful money maker for you.
By learning the terminology and what SEO is as we have started to talk about today, you are on your way to finding a good SEO contractor who can help your web site find success and get lots of profitable traffic. Use good common sense in finding an SEO company and check references and employ someone who can really do the job. It will cost you a bit to get the best expertise there is to improve your SEO. But when you see the flood of business and sales that come from the effort, you will know you made a wise investment in using them.
You will also want to make sure the articles you purchase from private label sites or ghostwriter services are optimized for your site's keywords as well. If you purchase a set of private label articles, for example, on the subject of weight loss it will be a good idea to re-write them using your own site's keywords.
If, on the other hand, you are outsourcing custom articles to a ghostwriter you can specify the articles be "SEO" ready for your chosen keywords upon delivery. This will ensure your articles will rank well in the search engines. These are just a few ways that using good SEO will create traffic to your website.
Programs like Awstats, a web-analyzing program found on most Linux based servers will show you how those web visitors came to you. Did they click through from a search engine? If so, what keyword brought them to you? Or, did they come from a particular website that links to yours? Your stats will reveal all.
Are the keywords used by visitors who find your site through the search engines. In the past few years a new science called "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) has evolved into a business model that specializes in making sure your web site gets a strong flow of business from people looking for your niche of goods and services using Google, Yahoo or one of the other big search engines.
The key on getting traffic from search engines is your "search engine ranking". That all sounds very complicated but it isn't. When you search for something on the Internet, Google (or your favorite search engine) provides you with lots of web sites for you to consider. The search result that comes first are called the first page. And usually there are dozens of pages of web sites that the search engine shows you.
Well, experts tell us that the majority of web shoppers use a web site shown on that first page of links that the search engine returns. So if your web site is among that first one or two pages, you have a good search engine ranking and you will see more customers than a business that is way down on page 54 where customers never go. One of the primary ways to get on that first page is by using good SEO.
SEO is the science of effective research and implementation with search engines so your web site gets a good ranking. SEO is also a fairly complicated science because it involves how your web site is programmed, the kind of text you have on each page and a good SEO expert has specialized tools and software to monitor your SEO on a daily basis to see how you are doing.
So how can we improve our web site's SEO? If you go talk to your web programmers, they will be aware of the terms we learned here today but they may not be equipped to do a professional job of improving your SEO. That is why most businesses that do well at improving SEO for their web sites do so using a professional outsourcing company that specializes in this kind of thing. There are good reasons for you to outsource this function as well.
An SEO company will have those specialized tools and software resources to do the job right. They understand how search engines work and they can prepare specific suggestions to your web team to improve your search engine ranking. And they can employ internet traffic specialists who have that expertise to take your web site from where it is and turn it into a successful money maker for you.
By learning the terminology and what SEO is as we have started to talk about today, you are on your way to finding a good SEO contractor who can help your web site find success and get lots of profitable traffic. Use good common sense in finding an SEO company and check references and employ someone who can really do the job. It will cost you a bit to get the best expertise there is to improve your SEO. But when you see the flood of business and sales that come from the effort, you will know you made a wise investment in using them.
You will also want to make sure the articles you purchase from private label sites or ghostwriter services are optimized for your site's keywords as well. If you purchase a set of private label articles, for example, on the subject of weight loss it will be a good idea to re-write them using your own site's keywords.
If, on the other hand, you are outsourcing custom articles to a ghostwriter you can specify the articles be "SEO" ready for your chosen keywords upon delivery. This will ensure your articles will rank well in the search engines. These are just a few ways that using good SEO will create traffic to your website.
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