Category: Keyword Research

Your keywords are also important with regards to off-page SEO. Many people think they can’t control factors that aren’t on their own websites, but this isn’t true.

There are two important things you can do to ensure your off-page SEO is as effective as possible:

Make sure to seek backlinks from relevant sites.

Make sure to control your anchor text.

Relevancy

A relevant backlink is one that comes from a page that discusses something that is on-topic for your niche. If you’re in the golf niche, you would want to seek backlinks from pages about golf. While almost any backlink is valuable, those that come from relevant pages are much more so.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that is used to link from one web page to another. If you were going to create a link to Google, your anchor text would probably be “Google”.

The code would look like this:

Google

If your page is targeting the keyword “buy golf clubs” that would probably be the keyword you would want to use for most of the anchor text linking to that page.

Notice I said “most” of the anchor text linking to that page. You definitely do not want to use the exact same text as your anchor text 100% of the time. This would look unnatural and potentially get your site penalized by Google. Instead, use your main keyword phrase about 50-75% of the time, and use another two similar phrases (such as “purchase golf clubs”) the rest of the time. This will look much more natural.

Search engines give a lot of weight to text in the title of your document, so it is especially important to ensure that you place your keywords there. Of course, there are other places in your document that are almost as important for keyword placement.

Domain Name

Having keywords in your domain name can really help boost your site’s rankings. If you wish to rank for “buy golf clubs”, you might wish to buy a domain like BuyGolfClubs.com or BuyGolfClubs.net.

In order, the best domain extensions for SEO seem to be:

.com

.org

.net

I don’t generally bother with any other extension, because they just don’t seem to work very well for SEO purposes.

URL

It’s not just the domain that counts, either. You can also put your keywords elsewhere in your URL. For example, you can name directories after keywords, and you can name HTML files with keywords, too.

For example:

http://www.golfkeyword.com/golf-clubs/buy-golf-clubs.html

Heading Tags

Heading tags are used on websites to separate various sections of a page. The H1 tag is given the most weight, but it should be used sparingly. You should use your main keyword in an H1 tag once on your page. Then you could use a couple of alternate keywords in H2 and H3 tags.

Body Content

Obviously, you would want to use your keywords in the body text of your site, as well. It’s a good idea to use your keyword phrase at least twice per page, but be careful not to overuse it. When you repeat the same phrase too many times on a single page, it can appear spammy and actually hurt your ranking.

The first thing you need to do is preliminary keyword research. This involves using keyword tools to find a large number of keywords that you would potentially want to target for your niche.

By now, you should have already chosen a niche. Now, you just need to gather a list of keywords you can use to get traffic from various sources such as search engines, or with pay-per-click marketing.

Let’s say you have chosen the acne niche. You’re targeting individuals who have acne and are desperate to get rid of it. You would probably want to start with seed keyword phrases like “acne” and “pimples”.

This would return keywords such as:

Get rid of acne

How to clear up acne

Get rid of a pimple

I use the Google Keyword Tool for this:

http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This tool is free, and it returns results directly from Google’s own internal database of searches people have performed. Although no keyword tool is 100% accurate, Google’s own data is likely to be the most accurate you will find.

Google will give you around 100 keywords. You can then dig deeper by taking some of the keywords it returns and using those as seed keywords to find more.

If you are creating a small niche site, you may want to focus on just a handful of keywords. In this case, the 100 keywords you originally find may be enough. If you want to create a large authority site, you will potentially want thousands of keywords. This will require you to continue digging, using some of the keywords you find as additional seeds.

Once you have a list of keywords, you need to analyze them. Not every keyword is going to be one you would want to focus on for SEO purposes. Some won’t have enough traffic to make them worth the time, and others will have too much competition to give you a reasonable chance to rank.

In the next section, you’re going to learn how to analyze your keywords to find out which ones you should concentrate on.

You should never tackle a list of keywords without first analyzing traffic and competition. It’s a waste of time and resources to focus on keywords that are too competitive or don’t get enough searches.

There is a specific “formula” I use to determine which keywords I want to focus on:

At least 1,000 monthly searches

No more than 30,000 pages in Google “in quotes”

No more than 10,000 results for “allintitle”

When you get your list of keywords from the Google keyword tool, it will tell you approximately how many searches each phrase receives each month. I don’t generally use keywords that have less than 1,000 searches per month, because they don’t usually bring enough traffic to justify the effort.

Next, you have to assess the competition. You want to make sure to target phrases you have a good chance to rank for, otherwise you’re wasting your time, because you probably won’t be able to rank on the first page if there is too much competition.

There are two steps to assessing competition. First, you need to find out how many people are using each keyword phrase on their pages. You do this by entering the keyword into Google in quotes. This will tell you how many other pages contain that exact phrase.

As you can see in the image above, the phrase “keyword in quotes” is used on about 6,090 other pages. This means you should have a fairly easy time ranking on the first page for that phrase.

Next, you need to see how strong those other competitors are. Google and other search engines usually give a tremendous amount of weight to the words appearing in the title of the HTML document, so you need to see how many of those pages are also using the phrase in their title.

This is done by entering this into Google:

allintitle:”keyword in quotes”

As you can see from this image, only 3 pages have the phrase “keyword in quotes” in the title. This is great news if you want to rank for that phrase, because it means you will almost certainly be able to rank on the first page for that phrase if you use the phrase in your title.

After you have used all of the keyword phrases you found that fit the main criteria, you can expand and use other keywords. Just stick to those that do fit the criteria in the beginning, because you will get better rankings quickly, so you can start seeing traffic and income sooner.

There are automated tools that make keyword research easier, but you will have to invest some money if you want to use them. For example, Market Samurai makes it very fast and easy to find and assess keywords, but it is pricey.

If you’re interested, you can check it out here:

http://www.marketsamurai.com