SEO Tips For Keyword Domination Lesson 2
This is continued from SEO Tips For Keyword Domination Lesson 1 for make money online review and other blogs.
In lesson 1, we learnt why simply setting up a couple of brand new sites and submitting them to search engines are not enough to get traffic going. This is despite having optimized the keyword for whatever you are selling. You need to do keyword research with a keyword research tool. A free online keyword tool was recommended: http://www.goodkeywords.com/
LESSON 2 – CHOOSING THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
Once we’ve downloaded this software, we can enter the most generic keyword for our website into the software. In our example, our keyword would be “weight loss”.
You’ll notice that in the screenshot below, Good Keywords will return a list of related terms. The “words” column will show us the top 100 search keywords that contain the words “weight loss”.
The “count” column will show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for in the previous month within the Overture.com search engine. Generally, you can multiply that number by 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.
This step is critically important because we need to know if there is a market for whatever topic we choose to sell. This tool will quickly show us if people are looking for what we want to sell!
You’ll notice that the keyword weight loss was searched 817,038 times during the previous month.
DO NOT start off by optimizing for the keyword “weight loss”
Why, you ask? If a keyword is searched that many times in Overture, then 100 times out of 100, the competition you will have to outrank in Google will be extremely fierce.
Not only is the competition fierce, but think about it… How targeted is the keyword “weight loss” anyway? Not very targeted at all. Someone searching for the keyword “weight loss” could very well be looking for free information on weight loss. They might be looking for the definition of weight loss. It’s really hard telling. Chances are, they’re not looking for anything specific about losing weight.
The keyword “weight loss” is not something you should try to take on.
As a side note, when I first started online, that was exactly what I did… and I did it very well. I ranked #2 on Google, out of over 66 million websites for the term “weight loss”. I ranked #1 for many other terms like “weight loss program”, “lose weight” etc. Although I was getting a TON of traffic, the product I was trying to sell was not converting very well at all… and now you know the reason why. I was targeting the WRONG group of people; a keyword phrase that was way too broad…
For a brand new website, or one you’re just beginning to optimize, it’s better to select more specific “long tail” keyword phrases. I’ll talk about this a bit later.
Next: LESSON 3 - ASSESSING KEYWORD COMPETITION
The next lesson looks at the competition. Other sites that are targeting the same keywords as you are. If the keyword is profitable, you can be sure there will be competition and depending on how stiff the competition is, there are certain steps you have to take to make your own sites stand a chance against others.