Keyword Research

Keyword research can help you in finding the best topics to create websites about and they can help you in building the best pages for your website. Everything online is about keywords- the words people use to search for what they are looking for. In order to best match websites with what people are looking for search engines use keywords as one of many of their criteria. Keywords will help you decide on a topic for your website, will help you get traffic to your site and will help you make money from your website so it is important to learn how they work and how to use them.

The basic concept of keyword research is to find the keywords that most people are searching for but yet have a chance of getting on the first page of search engine results. If the top pages are wikipedia and popular sites like amazon.com, you won't have a chance of getting into the top position for that keyword or concept. In terms of keywords - you won't have a chance if you are doing a website on travel...it is just too broad of a topic and too general of a keyword. Narrowing it down requires that you add keywords. You can pick a specific area that people want to travel to or some other aspect of travel - like choosing the best airline. As you add keywords on to travel you are defining a niche. The whole key to being successful online is researching keywords to find the best topic. You have to find out how many people are searching for those keywords and how many sites offer pages with those keywords and try to analyze it all to see if it would make for a profitable topic for a website.

The more you can get traffic from people who are searching with long tail (very descriptive) keywords the more successful your website will be. Like I write about massage therapy careers. I don't want to get found for the keyword 'massage' because who knows what people are really looking for and also I don't have a chance of getting found for that keyword (well a slim chance if any)

These are the two main free keyword research tools:

• Google's keyword search tool will tell you how many people searched for that word on their search engine during the previous month and give you estimates for the current month. They will also tell you other things about the keyword like the cost per click if you are going to use adsense to monetize your websites. They also give you other words in the same area that people might also be searching for.

• Wordtracker also has a free keyword tool you can use to research keywords and how many people are searching for them.

The keywords go into choosing the best niche or topic for a website if you want to create an online business. They also help you find the best words to use for an existing business. With so many websites out there today it is important to pick the right keywords or your site will never be found.

I also carefully research keywords when I am creating each page on a website. Sometimes I have topics that I want to write about but have poor keyword results I will have to decide how to present it and what to use. I usually go ahead and do it but only after creating pages with the top keywords in my niche.

So you also use keywords in every step of creating a website:

• Use them to choose the best domain name for your website
• Use them to plan the pages of your website
• Use keywords to figure out the best ways to monetize your website finding products or figuring out Google Adsense possibilities.
• Use the best keywords in the meta-tags of your website
• Use keywords strategically in the headline of your website and also in the first sentence of your webpage as well as a few times in the page and also in a text link in your page.

New! Comments