Search Engine Keyword Research Tips

Search engine keyword research is an incredibly important part of your SEO strategy. Never before in history have marketers, webmasters and business owners had what we have now. We know have the ability to find exactly what people are looking for. When I say exactly, I mean right down to the last letter! You now have the power to get inside the minds of potential customers and tailor make your webpages to cater exactly for what they are looking for. Let us take a look at a few ways you can do your keyword research to maximize your search engine visability.

1. Use the Google keyword tool.  This keyword tool, in my humble opinion, is the best search engine keyword research tool on there is. The search results come from the horses mouth and to my understanding are pretty damn accurate! If you are interested in a few other free tool too, try the SEO book keyword suggestion tool or keyword discovery. Both of these tools are excellent at finding keywords that people are actually looking for.
2. Find the competition of those keywords. Once you have done the initial research and found your keywords, you need to determine how many competing pages there are. This is very important because if the competition is too strong, your chances of your webpage ranking decreases considerably. How do you do this? Well, firstly go to Google and type your keyword surrounded by “” (inverted commas) Why do you do this? This will give you the exact match of competing pages for that keyword. This means that the webpages listed have all the words you typed in in a row.
3. Once you have done the necessary keyword research you are all set to put your website on the map! Now it is up to you write content on pages themed around the keywords that you researched.

These are some great search engine keyword research tips. If you have any questions, dont hesitate to ask!

Content Is King – Make It Work For You

The world wide web is a collection of billions of pages of content. You can access this content at the click of a button. Some is good, some is bad and some is just downright ugly. As a website owner the content on your website is what will seperate you from the rest of the pack. This is why, in our day and age on the internet, content is king. For this very reason, if you ever hope of making a success of an online venture, you need to make sure that your content is smartly written and very good. You need to do something to stand out from the rest of the crowd. Here are a few ideas on how to make sure your content works for you – SEO style!

Keyword research is the first and definitely one of the most important steps to ensuring your content will ever be seen by the masses. The idea here is to make sure that you craft your content (webpages) around keywords that people are actually searching for. And how do you do this? Read about the best free keyword research tool. This way you will get a great idea of how you should be building your website and creating your content to maximize your SEO potential.

Theme your pages. This cannot be overlooked. There are so many websites that try to target a whole lot of different keywords on a single page. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. It is extremely difficult to rank for more that one or two of your main keywords per page. What I like to do is theme pages around one or two keywords max. After you have done your keyword research, group your keywords together theming ones that are HIGHLY relevant together.

Write your content. I am sure you have heard the age old saying “failing to plan…” Well this is ever so true on the net. You have researched your keywords, themed your keywords and now you are ready to write some great content. As a rule of thumb I always try to make my website pages around 500 words. I think this is a good amount of content to have on one page.

So remember content is king – plan ahead and maximize your websites web presence!

Targeting Valuable Keywords

Keyword research is the most important step when planning a new website. Knowing what your target market is searching for will save you hours, if not days, of content creation and web page building that could yield useless in the future.  Can you imagine not doing any keyword research and designing a 100 page, content rich website targeting keywords that no one is searching for? You site will never be seen.

So which keywords should you target.

Usually your first instincts are to go with keywords that bring the highest amount of traffic, right? Because the more traffic you bring to your site, the more money you make. Well that might be true for some sites, (websites making most of their money off Adwords for example), but if you are selling something from your website this is usually not the case.

You are looking to target keywords that your soon to be customer is typing in when they are looking to buy something.

The first stage of our buying cycle is discovering the product. It can be from advertising, a TV advert, newpaper, practically anything can trigger the need, the want to buy something. Then we hop online and do our research.

The internet has so much information that we are spoilt for choice. You can compare prices of say a camera on 10 different websites in 5 mins as opposed to the offline method of browsing the mall for example. This is the second stage, the research phase. Now this might be (if you have a great deal) a good place to try and catch the buyer.

So for example: lets say we see an advert for digital cameras and we want one. We hop online and do the research. We would probably start with a generic term like “digital camera” or “cheap digital camera”. As you dive further into your research you will find the EXACT camera that you want, for eg. “Sony Cybershot DSCW120/B”. This is where you want to get your traffic from.The third and most important stage:

Buying phase. Now the person has done all their research and is ready to buy there brand new digital camera, they type it into a search engine and who comes up? You do, because you have researched your keywords properly and are waiting there to sell them the camera.

Remember, they keywords that bring you the most traffic are by no means the ones that will bring you the most money. If you liked this article and are interested in human behaviour and marketing check out Seth Godins blog. He is the master of these things!

Testing Your Market For Free (Almost)

Smart market research is the most important aspect of running an online business. What is market research? Wiki describes it as “the process of systematically gathering, recording and analyzing data and information about customers, competitors and the market.” No point in selling menswear to a dominantly female audience, right? You can see why it is imperative that  that you choose the right market.

So how can you do this on the web?

I have touched on keyword research before and how important it is to your online campaign. Also I have written about what I personally think is the best keyword research tool around. With any research tool you can get estimates on the amount of times people are typing in a particular key phrase per day or month. The main word being ESTIMATES. Assumption is the mother of all fu#$ ups, right? So how can you get exact, accurate numbers that will tell you exactly which search terms to target on your SEO crusade?

We are going to use Google Adwords. Thats why this is *almost* free. On the internet we are lucky because in the offline world businesses pay big bucks to find out exactly what consumers are looking for. In our online world we can find this out in days, it will cost us hardly anthing – in fact, you will probably even make some money off it.

Here is what you do:

Use the Adwords Keyword Tool to come up with a list of the best keywords YOU think are relevant to your website. Now you will get some average search result numbers but now we are going to see which ones are REALLY getting searched. Divide them up into little groups (the more similar the better), put them in your Adwords account and make a few ads for them, pointing to the relevant pages on your website. Set a maximum of $10 a day and make sure you bid just enough to be on the first page of the ad results. Remember, we are not after clicks here, we are after impressions.

Why?

Because this will give us a great idea of which of the keywords are being searched for and which aren’t. Soon you will start to see impressions racking up in your stats and you will be able to determine which keywords you should be targeting with your SEO efforts.

So remember, there is no point in launching an entire website without knowing exactly what your target market is looking for.

Best Free Keyword Research Tool

Keyword research is an integral part of a successful website. Why? If you dont choose the right keywords then no one is going to find your website! Think about it, if no one is searching for the keywords you have crafted your pages around, then you might rank for them on the SERPS, but obviously they will never be seen!

Whats the best free keyword research tool?

I would highly recommend using the Google Keyword Tool. This is for a number of reasons. Google is by far the leader in the search engine industry so I would listen to their stats more than any other engine. As you start to learn about keyword research you will also come across countless paid keyword research tools. They all have fancy bells and whistles, but usually the sales page is better than the tool itself. Oh, and did I mention that the Google keyword tool is free?

Another awesome tool is SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. Have play around with that and I am sure you will some great keywords for your website.

Wordtracker has a great free keyword tool here. Unfortunately is is a little limited, although you can find some great long tail keywords using it.

Remember, it is very essential SEO practise to cleverly theme your webpages around one or two keywords to ensure you get ranked in the SERPs.