In the internet marketing game, whether you're attempting to market affiliate products or trying your best to trap AdSense clicks like flies to honey, keyword research lies at the very heart of the matter and will make you or break you depending upon how well you do it.
But I have yet to read even 1 article that lays it all out and ties up all the loose ends.
So here goes.
Let's do what all successful people do when faced with a problem and work backwards.
In order to get clicks and sell affiliate products or score some AdSense revenue, we must have traffic.
People must see our splendid site or bitchin' blog or else all our work is for naught.
However, there is such a thing as competition; other folks who would also like to profit by our keywords.
If there is too much competition, then all the traffic in the world will do us no good if we are pushed down to page 14 of the Google search results and nobody can find us.
So, we must strike a happy compromise.
Step 1 Here is the part that most articles leave out.
The very first hurdle is to do a BROAD search (your keyword phrase not in double quotes), just as you would normally enter it in Google.
This returns how many pages contain those words in any order, not necessarily as a complete phrase.
You're looking for no more than say 500,000 websites returned.
Any more than that and there are going to be way too many let into the party.
Oh sure, we are going to do more sophisticated measuring of the competition, and some groovy SEO, but trust me, more than 500,000 broad search results and you are fighting an uphill battle because even though a lot of those are not optimized for your keyword phrase, guess what, they're still going to hit and stick on page 1 and push you down to page 14.
Can you ever hope to overcome this level of competition? Oh sure, but it will take a LOT of work.
Step 2 If your keyword phrase passes Step 1 then do an exact search on it (place the keyword phrase in double quotes).
Now you should see fewer than 100,000 pages returned by Google.
Again, any more than that and you are going to have to work hard to overcome it.
The double quotes is called an exact search.
It returns how many pages contain that entire keyword phrase (the words together in exact order).
Step 3 Lastly, do an intitle/inanchor search on your keyword.
Here is the syntax: intitle:"keyword phrase" inanchor:"keyword phrase" Both of these on one line separated by a space and run together as 1 query on Google.
Intitle will return the number of sites with your keyword phrase in the title.
Inanchor will return the number of times your keyword phrase appears in anchor text as part of a link.
You'd like to see fewer than 100 or so, but up to 300 may be workable.
The fewer the better however.
On-Page SEO Keyword phrase in title, meta tags, headings, and sprinkled about every 100 words throughout your content.
Off-Page SEO Backlinks baby.
And lots of them.
Using your keyword phrase in the anchor text of course.
See you on page 1.
But I have yet to read even 1 article that lays it all out and ties up all the loose ends.
So here goes.
Let's do what all successful people do when faced with a problem and work backwards.
In order to get clicks and sell affiliate products or score some AdSense revenue, we must have traffic.
People must see our splendid site or bitchin' blog or else all our work is for naught.
However, there is such a thing as competition; other folks who would also like to profit by our keywords.
If there is too much competition, then all the traffic in the world will do us no good if we are pushed down to page 14 of the Google search results and nobody can find us.
So, we must strike a happy compromise.
Step 1 Here is the part that most articles leave out.
The very first hurdle is to do a BROAD search (your keyword phrase not in double quotes), just as you would normally enter it in Google.
This returns how many pages contain those words in any order, not necessarily as a complete phrase.
You're looking for no more than say 500,000 websites returned.
Any more than that and there are going to be way too many let into the party.
Oh sure, we are going to do more sophisticated measuring of the competition, and some groovy SEO, but trust me, more than 500,000 broad search results and you are fighting an uphill battle because even though a lot of those are not optimized for your keyword phrase, guess what, they're still going to hit and stick on page 1 and push you down to page 14.
Can you ever hope to overcome this level of competition? Oh sure, but it will take a LOT of work.
Step 2 If your keyword phrase passes Step 1 then do an exact search on it (place the keyword phrase in double quotes).
Now you should see fewer than 100,000 pages returned by Google.
Again, any more than that and you are going to have to work hard to overcome it.
The double quotes is called an exact search.
It returns how many pages contain that entire keyword phrase (the words together in exact order).
Step 3 Lastly, do an intitle/inanchor search on your keyword.
Here is the syntax: intitle:"keyword phrase" inanchor:"keyword phrase" Both of these on one line separated by a space and run together as 1 query on Google.
Intitle will return the number of sites with your keyword phrase in the title.
Inanchor will return the number of times your keyword phrase appears in anchor text as part of a link.
You'd like to see fewer than 100 or so, but up to 300 may be workable.
The fewer the better however.
On-Page SEO Keyword phrase in title, meta tags, headings, and sprinkled about every 100 words throughout your content.
Off-Page SEO Backlinks baby.
And lots of them.
Using your keyword phrase in the anchor text of course.
See you on page 1.
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