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Keyword Search and Research Basics
Keywords are an important part to working online. It is the quality of your keywords within your content that will determine your search engine position (SEO-SEM), the quality of your Google Adsense Ads, other third party ads and most importantly, your ROI. So keyword research is important to your business.
Search Engines and Keywords
Keywords are gathered by the search engines. It is these keywords that help the search engines to determine the category, importance of your content (page rank), and the proper indexing of your pages. It is these same keywords that will also help people to find your website or blog. And if you did it right, you will see more visits to your website or blog and increased sales.
Keywords can help you in many different marketing mediums.
For instance, you need keywords to:
1) help you optimize your website content-
2) To Improve organic marketing and PPC
How to Find Quality Keywords
There are two steps to keyword research:
1. brainstorming keywords
2. researching the keywords
Brainstorming Keywords
There are many ways to compile your list. The first way, is the old pen to paper routine. You can write down as many keywords and keyword phases as possible. But again, this is limited by your
own frame of reference. But this gives you a start. From the manual you can utilize any of these different methods to expand your list.
When you are building your keyword list, you will need to learn the activity on each of the keywords you want to use. Then eventually narrowing the keywords down to those that will give you a good ROI. After the pen and pencil/brain power is exhausted where can you go for the actually keyword
research.
Keyword Research
After you have a starting list of keyword you will need to learn how many people are researching
those keywords (identifies the competitiveness of the words), how many searched were converted. This is where the keyword research tools come in to play.
1) Overture Keyword Search
-- Overture gives you related searches that include your keyword; keywords and phases; estimate of the number of times that the term was searched on within the last month. Just put in a single keyword and it will give you the keywords and keyword phases.
2) Keyword Tool by
Google-Google gives you a listing of the different keywords
phases-but it doesn't break it down numerically, but within a bar
graph format.
3) Thesaurus- Another great way to find synonyms.
Purpose of Keyword Research
Your main goal in keyword research is finding keywords on your website that will give you the greatest
ROI (Return on Investment). What has been found is that the keywords that most specifically identify your web page or website will return the best results. This means, that the keywords should fit the content. If you get the traffic, but the keywords don't fit the content than the traffic that is coming to your site will not stay. You have just wasted your time and energy, used up your bandwidth for untargeted traffic.
Many people make the mistake of going with just the popular words and the common generic words. You will quickly find out that the competition can be really stiff for these words. Why? You're competing with the big boys. And more times than not, you're not going to see much of a return for your trouble because you will not get the ranking you need for people to see your website or web page.
What can you do differently? Sometimes looking for long-tail phases
can produce additional income. What are long-tail keywords? Long-tail keywords are really keyword phases that are usually 3 words or more long, and that are more descriptive in nature.
I think it's probably best to give an example. Let say you are selling widgets. Some of your keywords are: widget, wooden widgets, steel widgets. The long tail phrase would be: green wooden
widgets; blue steel widgets. The long-tail keywords are really phases from people who know exactly what they want. And you will be surprised how the clicks can grow, if you are distinctively descriptive. If you don't want to fight the big boys for the top keywords, look at the long tail phases. You may find that you have better conversion rate on the terms.
Analyze Your Keywords
Analysis of your keywords and keyword phases are important. By analyzing your stats you can determine if the keywords or keyword phases you are using are giving you the results you want. If not, you need to tweak your copy. In addition, by keeping an eye on your stats, you may find a phrase that you did not optimize for- and which is showing you some positive results. Maybe, that phase may be worth optimizing for in your copy.
Keyword Density and Content
Keyword Density is the percentage of words on a page that matches a
set of keywords you have selected. For your content, you should stay within 5% to 10% of keywords used. Some have stretched their keyword density on their pages to 20%-but with the new rules put in place by Google-20% could see your site penalized for keyword stuffing. (Keyword stuffing is the use of your keywords within your meta tags and your content. You can usually spot keyword stuffing because the content
is so loaded with keywords that the content makes little or no sense.
I would suggest targeting at the most- three keywords on a page. You really need to keep a balance between keywords and quality content. Translated, if your keywords diminishes the meaning of your content-you'll quickly will lose the traffic that you want.
Difference Between Yahoo and Google Search Engines
Google- Google places greater emphasis on inbound links to your website.
The higher the PR of your inbound links the higher your search
results will be in the Google's search engine.
Yahoo- There emphasis is on website URLs, meta tags, and keyword
density. Keyword Density for Yahoo is between 6 and 8%.
Keyword
Search-Research Basics--How to find and choose your keywords for
content success..
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