Wednesday, December 3, 2008

What To Look For With Keyword Marketing Research

By Brian Armstrong

Just about any of your internet marketing efforts begin with finding keywords that people are actually searching for that you can use to get traffic. One of the most solid ways to get visitors to your website is through the search engines.

Begin the brainstorming process with the keyword phrases that come to mind when you think of what people might type in when they're looking for your product or service. Although you'll start with the more broad keywords, you'll find that when you ask yourself what condition your searchers are in when they search for certain things, you'll better understand if they are ready to buy or if they are just "browsing".

From the more broad keyword phrases, you'll be able to take more specific keyword phrases that indicate individuals being more apt to take action or buy products or services from you. For instance, someone that searches for "mp3 players" isn't as ready to actually buy an mp3 player versus someone who searches for "32GB iPod Touch 2nd Gen". Now, when you end up reviewing the competition for these keywords, there are millions of pages using the keyword phrases "mp3 players" but only a few thousand pages that use "32GB iPod Touch 2nd Gen".

Now that you've found both some broad and "long-tail" keyword phrases, it's time to see how many times per month these keywords get searched for. There are several free tools you can use to help you get these estimates. Freekeywords.wordtracker.com is one tool and another is Google Adwords keyword tool. These will both give estimates on monthly searches. Don't rely on just one of these tools, be sure to cross reference results so that you don't spend a lot of time going for a keyword phrase that doesn't really get that many searches.

When you have data about how many searches get done on these keywords, you'll need to cross reference the competition. You'll need to know how many other websites there are on the internet that contain your keyword phrase. Google has in its index a lot of websites and you'll be able to get some data on how many pages Google has where your keyword phrases are being used.

Google has some advanced search features that will tell you how many pages there are in its index that contain your keyword phrase in some strategic places. If you search with Google for the allinanchor or allintitle results, you'll have data about how often your keyword phrase is used as anchor text or used in the title of the website.

In order to decide which keyword phrases to use, start with keyword phrases that have a minimum of 100 searches per day or 3000 searches per month. Of course, if you are very specialized, you may go for less than 100 searches per day. It all depends on what you want for your business. As far as competition, target keyword phrases that have less than 10,000 allintitle results. The lower you can get on this number, the easier it will be to rank high on the search engines.

Finding keywords is just the start. Once you have your keyword phrases, you'll need to place those strategically in your web pages including in the page title, h1 tags, and within the content of the page itself. Ideally, you'll have about a 3-5% keyword density. What this means is that you'll use your 2-3 word keyword phrase about 1-2 times for every 100 words. If you have a few paragraphs in your blog post or your web page, plan on about 1 keyword phrase per paragraph. If you use those keyword phrases in the right way, you'll be on your way to getting those top rankings.

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