How To Do Keyword Research For SEO

After you have chosen your topic, you can start to picking niche site keywords.A keyword is a simple word or phrase that is typed into the search engine by a user searching for information. For example if searcher was looking for information on how to loose their weight, they might use some of the following common search terms.

Weight loss

Weight loss tips

How to loose weight fast

Keywords play important roles in optimizing a website, ranking on the search engines and reaching target market. Keyword research all starts with a keyword or keyword phrase that explain your website or blog. People will use variable of keyword phrase in order to find information on the internet. So, the more focused and targeted your keywords the greater your chances of ranking higher for your website's specific keywords. Keywords can be placed in domain name, post titles, a body of text, tag, category etc. and by having your primary keyword in your domain name is one of the key factors in achieving high rankings for a particular keyword phrase.

There are several tools on the web that can help you to broaden your keyword list further. By using these research tools, you can quickly expand your keyword list to get even more keywords to target. I personally prefer an easy, effective, free, but little time consuming way to find out niche value.You can either use of paid keyword research tools such as Micro Niche Finder review, Market Samurai, Keyword Elite, WordTracker or Traffic Travis if you are serious in a more advanced keyword research.

Go to Google Adword's Keyword Tool.

Make it sure that you checked all of these following columns -

* Competition

* Global Monthly Searches

* Local Monthly Searches

* Local Search Trends

* Estimated Average CPC

Let's say that you want to check out a keyword idea for weight loss. Type in the broad term "weight loss" in the keyword tool will retrieve a list of a lot more specific "weight loss" related keywords such as "weight loss diet", "weight loss pill", "weight loss food" and the list goes on. Download the keyword list.Once you gathered the list of keywords, it's time to do keyword analysis and find the most profitable ones. Elaborate it further and remove irrelevant keywords. These keywords should be targeted and related to your website/blog.

Refine Your Keyword List

In finding keywords to target, you are essentially looking for keywords that have good search volume, reasonably low competition and can monetize well.The first thing is the search volume; this is the amount of people that do searches for a word or phrase. Then we want to see the amount of advertisers that are competing for the phrases we're after. The last thing we determine is the amount of commercial value a keyword might have.

1. How many users are genuinely searching for your keywords?

After Google serves up the initial results, you'll want to limit the keyword ideas by specifying "exact match" for match type because it will produce a much precise data than the "phrase and broad match." Try to find keywords that have high search volume like 1000 or more per month. There is pointless selecting keywords that have low search volumes, let say 10 search per day as they will bring in very few traffic to your website/blog.

2. What is the search trend for your keyword within the past 3 years from top search engines?

Google Trends is a great keyword research tool that will show you variations in search volume for one or more keywords over the years. Google Trends reports graphically how frequently a number of search terms have been searched for on Google over the years. Google Trends will provide other information such as city, regional and language comparisons. It is simple to see that people in the United Kingdom search for "weight loss" about 2 times as much as people in Canada. Information like this can help website/blog owners focus marketing efforts regionally.

3. Rankability

The next step is to see how many competing pages there are online for the keywords you have selected.To do this, type in one of the keywords you're searching for into the query bar (make sure you do a "phrase match" search by enclosing the keyword in quotes). The lower the number of competing web pages, the better your probabilities are of gaining a top ranking for a particular keyword. I feel the least accurate, but it will give you a starting place and an idea of the competition. For many niches, keywords with less than 10000 competing pages are considered easy targets and it is a good chance it will give you the best search engine ranking. If your keyword is targeted have more than 100 000 competing pages usually means that the keyword is overly competitive.

Let say we have at least 1000 searches per month for the keyword phrase (around 33 search per day) and in order to rank quickly you will want the number of exact phrase match search results to be under 10,000 (with 50,000 being your total limit in most cases). If the keyword competition is low enough (under 10,000 pages) you can be on the first page of the search results in less than a week. Once you're on the first page you can expect to see at least 10% of the traffic. The higher you get ranked the more traffic you will get. If you're in the top 5 positions you'll get 30% of the traffic; top 3 - 50%; etc. So if the keyword phrase gets 1000 searches per month, you will improve web site traffic by 500 visitors per month once you reach the top three position.

4. Identifying the level of competition

Then you'll want to check some basic information about each competitor, such as data about their unique visitors each month, how longthe website has been running, how many pages are being indexed by Google and other major search engines,how many inbound links they have, their page rank, Alexa rank and any social media tools they use. You can get all those data by using SEOQuake Firefox plugin. If you find you're looking to get into a niche that is dominated by sites with high PR, tons of backlinks and an ad spend you might want to reconsider altenative keyword. Remove the super high competition keywords from your list because you maybe will not get that traffic and target lower competition keywords first so you will get quicker results.

5. How much Pay Per Click(PPC) price.

One of the ways people are using for website/blog monetizing is Google AdSense. If you are interested in making money with your blog/website, then you should consider high paying keyword because will produce high paying pay per click ads. So by targeting keywords with CPC $ 1 at least we would get $ 0.5 per click. Now if you plans to monetize the site with the AdSense ads, this information is crucial.

Okay, by now you should have 1-5 keywords that are highly relevant to your business, have a lot of monthly searches, fairly high paying and are not very competitive.With all these ways being done, rinse, wash, repeat - keep monitoring your keywords and make tweaks as necessary then you can proceed to buy domains name for your website/blog.

As you can see, keyword research and analysis can be time consuming,tedious and challenging task. Luckily most modern keyword research tools can do the same thing a lot faster. But it's a worthwile learning experience because thorough keyword research will help to discover the most relevant search terms used by potential visitors and should be the first step before trying build website/blog.