How to Do your Keyword Research Properly

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 10:17 am

Doing extensive keyword research is crucial as choosing bad keywords will result in you recieving little or no traffic to your website or blog.

Essentially, what you want to do is find out exactly what people are looking for in the search engines, then checking how many competing pages there are for these search terms and based on your rules choosing which keywords or keyword phrases you think you can rank for. Then what you do is take these terms and include them in your blog/websites content.

There are many keyword research tools that each have their own little differences. I started off using free keyword research tool. One of them is google keyword tool, the other one I used is Wordtracker. The latter I believe to be the best free keyword research tool.

Wordtracker also offers a 7-day Free Trial for the professional edition. This edition has many tools and more funcionality than the free version. Be sure to email a copy of all your keyword results, to yourself. (See Wordtracker’s online instructions for this.)

Competition Analysis

If your web-pages aren’t ranked in the top ten, you’ll get little traffic from that search engines.

An indicator of how feasible this will be to accomplish, is how many competing pages there already are. To find this, search on Google.

The question is: Should you search keywords in quotes, or not?

To determine level of competition, use quotes. To determine where you rank, use no quotes. Here’s why…

When you search with quotes, Google only gives you web pages that contain an exact match for your keyword. These pages have been “optimized” for that exact set of words, which usually means that the webmaster has been targeting that keyword for inbound links, as well.

So those web-pages are the ones you are going to have to directly compete with, for ranking. When you search with no quotes, Google gives you web pages with any of those words.

But most of these pages are NOT your competition, since they only have one word, or part of, your keyword phrase. So don’t worry about them.

No quotes, is how most people search, however. So you need to search that way, to see what they see – and judge how much traffic (if any) you’re going to get.

Note: In general, the more a phrase is searched for, the more competing pages it has in the search engines.

Money-page Keywords

We need different types of keywords for different purposes. Let’s continue using Acne as our example niche. After obtaining a list of longtail keywords from Wordtracker, we sort those keywords by Daily Volume, in descending order.

Then we look for the general niche keyword phrases, towards the top of the list. Here are some of the “competitive” keywords you could choose, within the Acne niche:

Keyword Phrase Daily Volume Google Competing Pages

acne scars 194 1,310,000
acne home remedies 145 81,000
acne scar removal 137 218,000
acne scar treatment 129 294,000
home remedies for acne 79 172,000
natural acne treatment 63 205,000
get rid of acne scars 63 91,100
natural acne treatments 48 111,000
home remedies for acne scars 36 19,900
acne remedies 35 366,000

Note: These figures are as of the date of publication.

These keywords have high competition, and would normally be difficult to rank highly for. But we will use lower competition phrases, to drive traffic to our main pages with our articles.

For the website model we will be using here, 10,000 competitors is a pretty safe bet. 100,000 is doable, if the top 5 sites for that keyword are not super-optimized.

So this is a judgment call, that only you can make.

If you were to tell me that you had lots of time to work on your Internet Business, and were willing to wait several months to see your main page highly ranked – I would recommend “acne home remedies”. It has under 100,000 competitors, with one of the highest search volumes of all the keywords in the table above.

If however, you told me that you had limited time available, and/or you wanted to see your main page highly ranked within several weeks (instead of months) – I would recommend “home remedies for acne scars”. It has considerably less search volume, but it is much closer to the 10,000 competitor side of the scale.

Feeder-page Keywords

We will discuss later, how to write quality articles that will get you high search engine rankings, for a variety of keywords. For now, we need to find low competition keywords, so we can get our articles ranked highly, quickly.

Again, for the website model we will be using here, anything under 100 competitors is easy to rank highly for.

So we look at our Acne keyword list, for keywords with Competition<=100 and as much Volume as possible. As an example sub-topic, in the area of “home remedies”, we find these 10 phrases:

Keyword Phrase Daily Volume: Google Competing Pages

heal depressed acne scars natural 9 1
lava soap to remove acne scars 50
omega 3 to heal acne scars 50
vanilla for acne scars 482
green tea for acne scars 30
salmon oil removes acne scars 30
olive oil for acne scars and stretch
marks 31
scotch tape on acne scars 32
acne home scar treatments 35
acne scars natural remedy 39

These phrases have total daily volume=41, which means we can get a decent amount of traffic if we target ALL of these keywords.

Finding Article Keyword Phrases

An interesting method to create content more easily, is to look through your
keyword list, for questions people ask in your niche.

To find these types of keyword phrases, you look for “question-words” such as: how, what, which, when, where, why, who, find, learn, answer, etc.

All of these keyword phrases, are phrases people search for when they are
looking for an answer. Thus, these phrases make excellent topics for your
articles. Since you will be using multiple phrases per article, you can answer several of these questions in one article. Knowing this, will help you to write the article much faster.

Note: What if you find some of these article phrases have high competition? You can still use the phrase to write an article, for submission to article directories, since articles published in these directories, can rank well for higher competition keywords (more on that later).

Find as many of these question-word, article phrases, as you can. You will need them, as you will be writing many articles for your site. You can use them in descending order of volume (i.e. highest volume first), and/or ascending order of competition (i.e. lowest competition first).

How to Use Our Example Article Keyword Phrases

Once you have your 10 keyword phrases, all related to a single sub-topic, you want to choose a primary phrase for your article. For our example, we could choose a readable version of our highest-volume keyword phrase: “natural healing of depressed acne scars”.

Then we select other secondary, related phrases. For instance, “omega 3 to heal acne scars” and “acne scars natural remedy”.

Finally, we want to separate out the single words, that are common between all these phrases. For instance: acne, scar, scars, heal, remove, natural.

We do this to avoid repeating phrases too often in our article, which would get us penalized by the search engines for “keyword stuffing”. Instead, we will repeat the single words we found, which will get us listed in the rankings, but without any possible “keyword stuffing” penalty.

Note: This is why classic “article keyword optimization” doesn’t work anymore.

The search engines are on the lookout, for articles that follow pre-set rules on where to insert their keyword phrases.

Using your actual article phrases only one or two times, plus the common single words often throughout your article, will keep your article targeted to your primary and secondary keyword phrases – without penalty. By insuring that a web-page on your site contains all of these single words, a search engine will pick it up for any search on your primary and secondary keyword phrases.

This article was adapted from Mark Dulisse of Click Bank Fortunes.

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