
Tips for
Choosing the
Best Keywords
Google Keyword Finder Tool
Target Niches
The best keywords are not necessarily the most popular. Also important
to success is the number of competing sites, and how targeted your keywords
are to your products and services.
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Niche keywords can produce a nice
flow of traffic if you're careful to pick ones that still have some
popularity.
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Niche keywords can significantly
increase your chance of success. Achieving a top rankings will be much easier
with niche keyword phrases versus very broad, highly popular phrases. No
top ranking can be guaranteed in an organic search engine like Google. There
are simply too many variables. Therefore, you'll greatly increase your
chances of success by choosing less competitive keyword phrases.
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Niche keywords will save
time. While you could use various tools and research to achieve top rankings
for fiercely competitive terms, the time required to do so may not be worthwhile. Let your
competitor waste their efforts on the ultra-competitive phrases. In the same
amount of time they spend trying to achieve a single top ranking for your
industry's most popular phrase, you could achieve top rankings on twenty
other phrases.
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Niche keywords yield more sales per
visitor. That's because these keywords are more targeted. Therefore, these
prospects have a better idea of what they want. If they find it on your site
at the right price, then your chances for a sale are much greater.
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FREE
SEO Web Design analysis.
Brainstorm for keywords in your
category
There are many ways to brainstorm new
keyword phrases. You can examine the content and the meta tags on your
competition's Web site to see what phrases they consider important. While this
is a good place to start looking for ideas, there's no guarantee they are
targeting the best keywords. You must check these keywords against the
corresponding popularity and competition factors. You could also consult with
your thesaurus for synonyms and related phrases and correlate these to
popularity and competition. Fortunately, WordTracker and the Google AdWords
keyword finder tool will do this for you
within seconds. Simply type in a word and it will return dozens
of the most popular keyword phrases, with the ability to drill down to hundreds more.
In fact, the phrases you find here may trigger many new ideas to expand or
grow your company's business into areas you had not previously considered. Choose only relevant keywords
Just because a keyword is popular with a
low competition factor, doesn't mean you should target that keyword or phrase.
You may be tempted to optimize for phrases that are only loosely related to
your site's content -- but DON'T.
The phrases you target must be relevant
to what you have to sell. They must also be applicable to what you have to offer
on the specific web page you are optimizing. How many times have you searched
Google, landed on a page, and then backed out within 5 seconds of arriving? That page had a top ranking, but it did not have what you were looking for.
Perhaps the Web site did have what you
wanted, but the product resided elsewhere on the site. Unfortunately, your
visitor may never know this. If you target a keyword or phrase, then the page
they land on must offer the products, services or content that they expect, or
you'll be wasting your time and your visitor's time. At the very least, the
page should offer direct links to the potential products and services they may
expect to find there.
How do you know what people are looking
for on your pages? Simply check your Top Search Phrases report in
your web tracking software for a list of the keywords
people searched on to find each page of your site. You may be surprised to
learn that pages are ranking well on phrases that you had never considered.
You can also see which keywords and phrases are driving the highest conversion
and revenue, to ensure you maximize the return from your SEO effort. Once you
identify these pages and search phrases, make sure you are giving the visitor
exactly what they expect to find based on the phrases used to find the page.
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FREE
SEO Web Design analysis.
Understand that keywords can have
multiple meanings
If you have a travel business, then your
first thought might be to target the word travel. However, if someone is
searching on just plain old "travel" are they:
- Helping their child with a paper on
some aspect of "travel?"
- Looking for the "travel channel?"
- Looking to plan a vacation cruise?
- Preparing to take a business trip?
- Day dreaming about time travel?
- Looking for driving directions for
their travel across the country?
- Looking for a travel club such as
AAA?
- Looking for the perfect backpack or
hiking supplies for a travel expedition?
If you own a travel agency that
specializes in vacation cruises and optimized your site for the single keyword
"travel," only a limited number of the people identified in the example above
would be qualified prospects. This of course assumes that travel was not too
competitive to begin with.
While a top ranking on travel would
yield a great deal of visitors to your site, many of them would select the
"Back" button in their browsers, turn around and effectively walk out of your
store! That's not the outcome you're looking for. When you select more
targeted keyword phrases such as "Alaskan Cruise," there is a much higher
likelihood that you have focused in on exactly the right audience. It's the
difference between attracting actual buyers versus tire kickers.
Doing a quick search with a
keyword finder tool is a
great way to get a feel for all the keyword variations that your audience may
be searching on. You'll also discover which are the most popular, and least
competitive. This is not only invaluable in regard to search engine marketing,
but for your marketing efforts in general.
This article is copyrighted and has been
reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition Gold.
FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the
first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you
improve those rankings. A free trial of WebPosition Gold is available from their Web site.
Contact me for a
FREE
SEO Web Design analysis.
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