andrewgoulding.info - keyword-research

Keyword Research

O.K., there's no doubt that keyword research is usually an incredibly important part of any site's success.

The idea is that:

you decide upon a topic for your site e.g. "shoes" and perform your keyword research, expanding "shoes" to a number of related keywords
the expanded list might include sandals, slippers, running shoes etc. You then build pages for each of those keywords
if necessary expand each of those pages further e.g. leather sandals, plastic sandals, Paris Hilton sandals etc.

Now, you carry out your keyword research on each page and bring as many relavant, semantically connected phrases into the text until it's reasonably concentrated with relevant INFO.

That's the theory and unfortunately, it can become very time-consuming when you're cross-referencing various sources to get your keywords. This becomes a virtual snail's pace when your keyword research involves searching for keyword "diamonds"...finding phrases that people are searching for...but which aren't being catered for by many pages.

In the "shoes" example, there might be a lot of competition for the phrase...

..."plastic sandals"

but almost none for...

..."new york plastic sandals".

If that fits the brief of your site, you might consider optimizing your plastic sandals page for "new york plastic sandals"...to corner that market.

There are a number of high quality tool & services that webmasters & internet marketers use to find the exact phrases that people are presently searching for. The best known and most respected is Wordtracker, an online-based service that I first started using in 2003.

While there are a number of other keyword research tools around, the ones I also use are:

Google's FREE Adwords keyword tool
Keyword Elite, which I use mostly for Google Adwords but sometimes for ordinary web pages
Keyword Explosion, a database of phrases being used as keywords in Google Adwords campaigns is great for anyone contemplating making Adsense sites of they don't have Keyword Elite
my web stats, which show exactly what phrases people are using to enter each page of my sites &
my proprietary blend of 11 different herbs & spices. I can't really be much more precise than that because as I said at SEO, I'm no SEO purist

Writing For SEO

You can do all the keyword research you like but if your language is stiff and keyword-heavy, you will turn away your readers in droves.

Karen Thackston has been one of internet marketing's quiet achievers for many years now, and I consider her advice on how to turn keyword reseach into copy worth reading to be incredibly valuable.

Most SEOs don't even mention this step and far too many internet marketers have failed because they paid too much attention to ever-evolving expensive software and not enough to simple language.

How To Increase Your Keyword Saturation Without Destroying The Flow Of Your Copy

...isn't an attention-grabbing headline but it sums up this short book perfectly.

Though Karen's unassuming site is rather drab, I think that you'll find that her copy is so easy to read that it effortlessly creates a conversation-like ambience, one which readers immediately trust.

Believe me, state-of-the-art SEO is one thing but if you want your keyword research to pay off, and you want your visitors to stay at your site, you really should get Karen's virtually unknown e-book. It's worth its weight in gold...and best of all, virtually nobody else knows about it.

How To Increase Your Keyword Saturation Without Destroying The Flow Of Your Copy