Keywords Lifeblood of Websites – How-To Do Keyword Research Step-by-Step
Keywords are the lifeblood of any website. Keywords are the phrases that Internet surfers use to search for anything online. When learning how to make a website, keywords are the first and most important consideration.
Keyword research is fairly simple and begins by using some free tools that are available from various sources.
SEOBook Free Keyword Tool and the Google Free Keyword Tool are two of the best sources for keyword research. There are many other tools and some of them cost quite a bit of money, but I do think it is a good idea to pay for keyword tools, as no tool is completely accurate, and the free ones work just as well as the paid ones.
Just plug in a main word of interest, such as, computers, and the tools will return all the related queries for that keyword and the numbers of times they have been searched, either daily (SEOBook tool) or monthly (Google tool).
The general rule of thumb is you want to have at least 10,000 in total combined searches for the keywords you want to use on your site. But, of course the more the better. Keyword popularity is an important indicator of the success of the site, and it’s traffic potential.
Example:
cheap computers = 6,500 searches a month
buy computers = 4,000 searches a month
These two keywords are good to use on the computer site, and they will be the main focus of the site, sitewide.
Another important consideration is to use common sense, if the keyword sounds like something that a lot of people would search for then go for it. Sometimes you will find keywords that show a lot of searches but they are awkward in grammar, such as “computers super cheap”, while this may show a lot of searches, I doubt that it is an accurate count, and not likely that a lot of people would search for that, at least not on a consistent basis, month after month.
Long Tail Keywords
The Internet is very competitive. This, however does not have to be a block to making a successful website, thanks to long tail keywords.
Long Tail Versus Main Keywords
A main keyword would be “computer” versus a long tail keyword, which would be “buy cheap computers”. If you check the competition for any niche main keyword you will find way too many competing websites, that could take months or years to rank for in the SERPS (search engine page results), but the long tails are much less competitive and those are the best choices, especially when you are new to making and promoting websites.
When you plug in a main keyword, such as “computer” into the above mentioned keyword tools, you will get back a long list of all the long tails that people are searching for within that main keyword.
And then you choose those that have a good amount of monthly searches, along with an optimal amount of competing websites.
Researching the Competition
The next step is to find out the competition for each of those long tail keywords.
1. Go to Google search
2. Enter: allintitle:”long tail keyword”
3. View the results
The optimal results will show less than 50,000 websites in the results
The 1st page will have no Page Rank 4 sites, and less than 2-3 PR3 sites. Anything more than that in the first page SERP results will make it very difficult to rank for those keywords. If you find keywords that have mostly PR2 or less sites then that is a great keyword and will be much easier to rank for.
This procedure should be repeated for every keyword you want to use on the site.
Remember, these are going to be the site’s site-wide keywords, which means they are the ones that will be the focus of the entire site and specifically the home page.
For inner pages, and content pages, such as guides, articles and product pages you will want to do more research and find those phrases people are searching for that are related to the inner page you are creating.
How To Check PR of Competing Websites
If you notice on the screenshot above there is a little toolbar that shows the Page Rank and other important info for each of the sites listed in the SERPS. This is provided by SEOQuake, a must have tool for any webmaster as it has lots of uses, especially for showing the Page Rank in the SERPS for keyword research.
Download SEOQuake (this is only for Firefox browsers). Once downloaded you will see the tools little icon in the right hand side lower bar of your browser (as shown in the screenshot below). All you have to do is click it to activate it and then the toolbar will show up in SERP results, or at the top of any website you visit, so you can check it’s pertinent data. Click it once to turn it off when it is not needed.
By Tour to kerala, 08/03/2009 @ 3:49 am
Thnx for a wondeful article.
.-= Tour to kerala´s last blog ..Kerala Honeymoon Tour =-.