How To Do Keyword Research For Search Engine Rankings
Recently I have become interested once again in making a nice residual income with Google Adsense. Because I have just begun school holidays, which means nine weeks of free time for me, I have set myself a goal to build 15-20 content sites utilizing Google AdSense as the main source of income for each. It was actually visiting Garry Conn’s blog that inspired this, so a big thanks to him.
It is a proven fact that visitors from search engines are the most valuable and targeted traffic a website can get, and therefore, for content sites, investing time into keyword research is crucial in order to rank well in search engines, bringing in the most valuable traffic possible. For content sites, the optimal keywords to focus on are the medium to long tail keywords, as many webmasters skip all medium competition keywords and optimize straight away for the long tail keywords, sometimes creating more competition in long tail keywords than in some higher traffic, shorter keywords.
How To Properly Conduct Keyword Research And Optimize For These Keywords
- Find Smaller Niche Markets – I spent an hour today just wandering around my house analysing every item I saw for the potential of a market online, and realised that the number of markets is unlimited; from white goods to linen, gardening to posture, the potential for an adsense income is endless. Take the time to find a good market which you have some knowledge in that you feel people want to know more about. People use search engines to find answers… know whether or not you can provide the answer.
- Search For Optimal Keywords Using Multiple Tools – Once you have selected your niche market, run it through three different keyword tools: Google’s Keyword Tool, WordTracker Free Keywords, and SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool. The reason why I say run it through three tools is because no tool can be completely accurate, so by comparing the results across multiple keyword tools and selecting those keywords common to most or all of the keyword tools you will have the best chance that those terms are the terms being searched for instead of a term that showed up in one tool and won’t bring any traffic. When analysing keywords to optimize, I usually keep those with less than 20,000 results with the function: “keyword”; that also have less than 2000 results with the: allintitle:keyword function. I don’t remove those keywords with little search value, because although there may be very few visitors who come from that keyword, they are still worth more than not being there.
- Combine Similar Keywords Into One – Because I’m not much of a writer, I like to minimize content writing time to as little as possible. Therefore, by combining similar keywords to include both in one page, the amount of writing is reduced. Say for example you are targeting the keywords “Australian Plants” and “Australian Animals“; I would combine these to create a page titled “Australian Plants And Animals“, therefore having to write less content to create a good sized article, killing two birds with one stone.
- Buy The Domain Name After Deciding On The Keywords – The trick in this is to take the most occurring keyword in your list of targeted keywords and buy the domain name with this keyword in it as the primary word. By doing this, search engine ranks will increase overall as more webpages will contain the part of the targeted keyword more frequently in the URL.
With all that done, all that is left is to create quality, unique content, making use of title, heading, and alt tags, and to build some links.
When I get my first of the 15 sites up I will show you it and tell you how it’s going, and step you through exactly what I do from start to finish of creating my second website.
Is It Worth Submitting To Link Directories Anymore?
Submitting your site to link directories used to be one of the fastest ways to gain PageRank, send traffic and boost your Search Engine Rankings. However, recently, many link directories have had their PageRank stripped and all importance taken. They are seen as link farms by Google.
At the same time, the benefits of DoFollow Blog Commenting have been revealed and many more people would rather focus their time on more natural ways to gain backlinks, such as link baiting and article writing.
So is there a need to waste time submitting to multiple directories when time could be used instead to help other link building strategies. I have first hand seen the benefit of focusing my time onto DoFollow blog commenting on one of my other sites, which has gained me sitewide backlinks from high authority blogs and much more traffic than I receive from all directories combined. You are still able to use anchor text and this will help you rank higher in the search engines.
Forum posting is another extremely worthwile link building strategy. I find forum posting so great because not only does every post I make count as a backlink to my site (from my signature), nor because it brings great traffic, but because I also learn more about the topic of the forum I am participating in. All of the information you can ask for on many topics is contained within forums.
The Do’s And Don’ts Of Link Building
Do
- Comment on DoFollow blogs regularly
- Post in multiple forums related to your topic with a link to your site in your signature
- Write unique and interesting articles for publishing to your site, then rewritten to article directories such as EzineArticles and ArticleDashboard
- Create link bait by writing interesting and controversial articles and publishing them on your site
- Always search for new ways of link building
Don’t
- Spam blogs, whether NoFollow or DoFollow
- Submit to link directories (your time can be better focused – if you are going to then I recommend paying someone to manually submit your site for you
- Have your site linked to on any spammy pages or sites completely unrelated to yours