Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Practical SEO – Keyword Tutorial


Keyword Research
So far we have covered the basics of how search engines operate, although not necessary for succeeding in an online business, it is a competitive edge that every serious person needs to know before applying SEO techniques. What’s the use of other knowledge if you don’t know what will work? Well we have come to the breaking point for every website, creation process. Creation process is simple, you pick a niche, and we will talk about that later and it’s not that simple, and then you look for the keywords that you want to target.
Sounds easy, but trust me it’s not. You have to pick the right keywords; after all, you don’t wish to rank for keywords that no one ever looks for! So, what is our first step in selecting a keyword, it’s brainstorming! So you have a niche, we’ll use Practical SEO as an example. People that are looking for SEO, keyword research, linking, and any other thing related to SEO have a limited number of keywords they can use to look up sites containing information about those. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that typing “Yerba Mate tea” will not lead you to an SEO site. So look up all of the keywords surrounding your niche, synonyms and so on.
After you have written down dozen of related keywords or more you need to do some research for those keywords. What is the competition, what is the global search volume, conversion and so on.
You can do this by visiting Google Adwords Keyword Tool and typing your desired keyword. This is good for more than one thing; you will get the statistics for the keyword you typed in, level of competition for that keyword, global search volume per month and local search volume and also you will have a peak at the trends for that keyword.
Keyword Research
Keyword Research
The greatest thing is that you will also get plenty of other related keywords and their statistics, so that way you can choose even more related keywords and find the right one for you. Now when we say the right one for you we mean the one that will bring you profit. In order to find that keyword you need to look at conversion rates, which is a number or percentage of people searching for a term that actually click on the link or buy the item or product.
After that the estimate of number of searches, how many people are looking for that exact phrase, the price for the click from the advertisers or value per customer. And the last part is to evaluate the competition, or in other words, the difficulty to rank highly for that keyword. Once you do all of this you will get a nice list of keywords to use, but don’t make the mistake people did 10 years ago. Stuffing keywords on one page is meaningless, so pick two or three keywords per page and go for a percentage of 1.5% to 5%. Everything over 5% is going overboard. After your site is built up and established you can experiment, but until then take it nice and slow.
Since this is Basic SEO we won’t go further, this is more than enough for you to grasp the concept and actually act on it; the next part is Long Tail Keywords, something you need to learn if you want to make it in the online world.

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