Keyword Research – Back2Basics

carmstrong — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 02:09:03 +0000

When beginning any online business, it is important to do your homework before diving in head first. Keyword research is a necessary step to a successful online business.

Decide on niche.
Find keywords that identify and relate to your niche.
Implement those keywords within your website and blog.
Continue using those keywords with your content often.

Why is keyword research so important? The majority of your website traffic should come from search engines because that means that people are searching for what you have to offer them instead of you seeking out your customers. Keywords are as equally important for pay-per-click (ppc) campaigns as well as natural (or organic) search engine rankings.

Basic keyword research steps:

Visit Google’s Keyword Tool.
Type in your keywords. Google will display a number of results and… most recently have starting displaying the search volume in numbers instead of a little graph that doesn’t really tell you anything.
In this list, you are looking for the Approx Avg Search Volume. That is an approximate number that tells you how many searches are done each month. That gives you an idea of the demand of that keyword.
Start a spreadsheet to track your results and put your keywords in your list.
Now we need to find out what the supply of that keyword is. I do this with Google. Visit Google. I use the allintitle:”______________” search method that tells me how many other webpages Google says has that exact keyword phrase in the title of the webpage.

Step 3

Step 5

There are no set rules on how much competition vs. search volume (supply vs. demand) makes a keyword ‘saturated’ but i like to follow the 30/20 Rule. The average monthly search volume should be more than 900 per month (average 30 searches per day) and the allintitle:”___” search results should be less than 20,000. Obviously. the less the supply and the more the demand – the better.

This blog post is more for me than anyone else. I titled this post, “Back2Basics” because lately, when I have started a new internet project I often times fail to do the proper keyword research and, even more so, fail to properly use the keywords for maximum benefits. I know how to do it but I don’t always to it myself.

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Keyword Research – Back2Basics