keyword research basics part 2

keyword research basics part 2

Let’s take a moment to look at the procedures involved in choosing keywords for your site.  No matter what your product or service, it is almost certainly not alone on the Internet.  And while everyone is vying for the top spot, they are all taking a different path to get there.  Some are hoping to get a top SERP (Search Engine Result Page) listing, while others are aiming for a top PR (PageRank), which is how well your site is viewed by search engines, usually by Google alone.

What you need to know is that there are factors involved in getting a top listing in either category.  How many similar sites are already using the keywords is the one most people look at first, and while this is important, it reflects very little about reality.  If 25 million people are using the term “best SEO anywhere” on their website, and only 5 people a day are searching on that term, there’s a lot of fighting going on for a keyword that is basically useless.  It looks popular in a search engine listing, but has nearly zero popularity in the real world.  Welcome to term popularity versus search popularity.  Term popularity means you have a lot of competition among other sites, while search popularity means that people are actually trying to find your type of services.

There’s a third option, that falls somewhere between the previous two, and that one we can call “link popularity”.  This, as the name implies, is how popular the term is, determined by how often someone actually clicks on that term as a link.  Ideally, you want to use keywords which have a high search popularity, the highest link popularity, and the lowest possible term popularity.  “SEO” is hugely term popular (250 million entries), making it almost impossible to gain visitors to your site, while “SEO design” narrows the field considerably (2.9 million), and “expert SEO design” becomes a manageable term (419 thousand) that can be worked with.  Admittedly, I haven’t performed the analytics on these terms, but even without taking link popularity into account, it’s easy to see that the third choice will be one that is often used, and has much less competition for your services.  And it gets better, because the third choice will also be found in both of the other two searches, effectively giving you exposure to a whole range of searches on the “SEO” term.

Without the use of web analyzation utilities, it is nearly impossible to know which terms are link popular, but performing simple searches can quickly show you how popular various keyword choices are.  Using the aforementioned utilities is imperative, but you can narrow your choices down considerably before ever using analytics by performing searches, making lists, and looking at the results obtained.  In many cases, enough information can be gathered by simple searches to point you in the proper direction, which can be further enhanced by simply studying the search results that already exist, by using the old-fashioned method of visiting the sites who get top listings, and carefully studying the content of those sites.  You will be amazed at how often a site ranks at the top of a search result, but the keyword is used only once or twice in the content of the site.  You can benefit from this by simply using a keyword density that sets your site above the others.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com