Keyword research guide for beginners
You have probably heard the term "keywords" mentioned in articles and forum posts you have researched, but do you really know what keywords are?
I am going to be writing a number of basic idiots guides to DIY SEO. The intention here is not to blind folks with the huge range of option and opinion, just simply to provide a basic understanding as to how it all works! So starting at the beginning we are going to look at keywords, how to go about choosing the right ones, and how to use them in a site and indeed a link building campaign.
A keyword is the word or words used to search for something in a search engine, so lets have an example to see how this works. Lets say you are having trouble with Winmx, so you goto www.google.com and you type in 'Winmx help' or 'Fix Winmx' these are keywords, you should now see a range of websites that feature in googles index and rank for the term you have typed in.
The search engines aim to show you the websites that best suit the keywords you have typed in, this is their job. The trick is, when creating and marketing your own website, to set the site up specifically with a keyword or number of keywords in mind, this effectively will be your target audience. If you select your keywords incorrectly you may find that visitors arriving at your site, do not find what they are looking for and quickly leave for another site.
So, how do you decide what keywords you should target?
- Common sense plays an important part here, if you are building a website to show information about a certain topic, there will be a number of keywords that naturally spring to mind, its likely if you can think of them, that others will aswell. Tapping your common sense is the first step, think carefully to yourself, what would you type into google to find the information on your chosen subject?
- Keyword research - there are a number of websites that offer tool that can actually provide numbers on how many people are searching on a specific keyword, this can help you to decide what people are actually looking for, however you should be aware that the data displayed on these keyword research sites are rarely accurate and best used as a guide only.
My advice would be to select a range of keyword, perhaps 10 at first, that are all relevant to the topic of your site. Then, its time to wittle them down to a more practical number, in this case we are going to aim for 3. See the example below as a rough guide:
Lets say we are going to create a site about Batman, here's a list of related keywords, the number is the predicted daily searches for the specific keyword every day. The second number is the number of other sites also using these keywords ie: the competition:
Now, in order to choose the best keywords for your site, you need to look for the best ratio of predicted searches vs the competion, what do i mean by this? Well, lets look at the keyword 'Batman Begins' lots of people are searching using that keyword, however there are almost 8million websites who have targeted that keyword, thats an awful lot of competition for you to take on! So lets look at a more suitable keyword, 'batman wallpaper' it gets a predicted 5, 675 daily searches, but only around 30,000 sites are competing for those visitors, so in essence this would be a good keyword to use.
So, after applying the same theories to the rest of the list, I have selected the following keywords:
Thats four I hear you cry, well yes it is 4, but they are all quiet similar, so I decided to roll with 4, this is NOT an exact science, you do have to constantly apply common sense. Keywords that have a good ratio of searches to competition are often referred to as "Niche".
Now, i am going to create a title for my website, the title is the line of text that appears right at the top of your screen and indeed is shown in the search engine results. When writing a title for your site it's important to use your keywords, search engines consider your title to be a big indication of what your site is about. For this example I will write what is called a 'longtail' keyword phrase, in fact all this is, is a line of text that encompasses your chosen keywords:
"Batman desktop wallpaper and pictures at our free gallery"
You will notice i have used all the important words from our 4 chosen keyword phrases.
Well, thats all I have for now, I will be adding further articles including keywords part2, links building, and a guide to some basic techniques to get things moving. Just remember, there is NO hard and fast rule to successful search engine optimization, it's a blend of common sense, technique, skill and a little luck all added together with an ability to come up with innovative ways to market your website.
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