Monday, November 17, 2008

How To Find Keywords for Marketing Research

By Brian Armstrong

Just about any of your internet marketing efforts begin with finding keywords that people are actually searching for that you can use to get traffic. One of the most solid ways to get visitors to your website is through the search engines.

Begin with a spreadsheet where you can keep a record of your keywords. If you begin with the most common keywords or keyword phrases that represent what you think people are searching for when you want them to find your website. This is the list that most everybody else that has a website has considered, so we need to take this to the next level with more specific keywords.

From the more broad keyword phrases, you'll be able to take more specific keyword phrases that indicate individuals being more apt to take action or buy products or services from you. For instance, someone that searches for "mp3 players" isn't as ready to actually buy an mp3 player versus someone who searches for "32GB iPod Touch 2nd Gen". Now, when you end up reviewing the competition for these keywords, there are millions of pages using the keyword phrases "mp3 players" but only a few thousand pages that use "32GB iPod Touch 2nd Gen".

There are a couple of websites that can be used to determine how many searches are done on a monthly basis. Once you determine this, add this information to your spreadsheet. It will come in handy when you need to see which keywords are worth pursuing vs. those that will be a waste of time. The two websites that you'll be using are Google Adwords keyword tool and the freekeywords.wordtracker.com website. Both of these will give you keyword ideas and the number of monthly searches.

Once you know how many monthly searches there are for your keywords, you need to know which of those keyword phrases have the most competition and the least competition of course. When you can identify keyword phrases that get a good amount of searches with very little competition, you'll have keywords that you can use to get some good results.

Google has some advanced search features that will tell you how many pages there are in its index that contain your keyword phrase in some strategic places. If you search with Google for the allinanchor or allintitle results, you'll have data about how often your keyword phrase is used as anchor text or used in the title of the website.

In order to decide which keyword phrases to use, start with keyword phrases that have a minimum of 100 searches per day or 3000 searches per month. Of course, if you are very specialized, you may go for less than 100 searches per day. It all depends on what you want for your business. As far as competition, target keyword phrases that have less than 10,000 allintitle results. The lower you can get on this number, the easier it will be to rank high on the search engines.

Finding keywords is just the start. Once you have your keyword phrases, you'll need to place those strategically in your web pages including in the page title, h1 tags, and within the content of the page itself. Ideally, you'll have about a 3-5% keyword density. What this means is that you'll use your 2-3 word keyword phrase about 1-2 times for every 100 words. If you have a few paragraphs in your blog post or your web page, plan on about 1 keyword phrase per paragraph. If you use those keyword phrases in the right way, you'll be on your way to getting those top rankings.

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