Getting Great Keywords

Why Keywords are Important

If you look at the internet, some of the statistics of the internet, some important facts come out, if we look at all the websites on the internet and there are gazillions of websites in the internet and pretty much the majority of the traffic according to the statistics, over 80% of the traffic that goes to those websites on the internet comes from the search engines. If you got 80% of your traffic coming from search engines then that's going to be a pretty important thing that you should pay attention to and promoting your website and making your website successful, because the majority that comes from search engines. People need to find your website when you think about it there are so many websites and your website is one grain of sand on that beach and you want people to find you and if you just blend in with all the rest of the sand on that beach you're not going to be very successful so you got to do some things to differentiate yourself or separate yourself from the rest of the sand on the beach so people can actually find you.

This is the way that 80% of the websites are found in the search engines and that's a pretty important thing to pay attention to. So let's first look at search engines and just kind of breakdown how they work and how keywords get in to this.  

Figure 1.0 is a sample of a search on Google. Google is the biggest search engine out there and we want to pay attention to the biggest traffic generator on the internet and it is probably Google so it's a good place to take a look.

             Figure 1.0 A search for 'dog food' and the search results that were given back.

In figure 1.1, there are different areas that have been marked down in yellow, this is paid advertising. So the listings that are at the top and down the right-hand side are all paid advertisings. Now, the way that you can get your website listed in that paid advertising area is through Pay-Per-Click advertising and what you do is you sign up for an account and you bid on keywords and you’re going to pay a certain amount for keywords and depending upon how your bids compare to the other competitors, and that depends upon where you show up on this part of the search. Now, keyword is really the search words that are typed in, if you look at what they are searching for.   

Figure 1.1 Paid Advertising

Dog food is the keyword that was used and so in developing keywords you got to think what do your potential customers typed in to search engines and search on. That's the keyword and you want to make sure that when your potential customers typed in that search you come up on the screen, again you show up in the paid area or if you want to show up on the main area of the search(Figure 1.2), this is called organic search listings and these listings are ranked by Google when Google search engines go out and analyze websites, they determine from a number of different criteria which websites are going to be placed on the first position, the second position and then down to whatever number of positions there are. So, if you are on the Pay-Per-Click area, you're going to be on it and then the person who pays the most money and there are some other factors involved in that as well but it's primarily what you bid on it that going to determine where you appear on the page and then if you're in the organic listing, we typically call that SEO or search engine optimization, that's going to determine where you are going to show up in this listing and keywords are critical in those two items.

Figure 1.2 Organic Search Listing

Another statistic that I think is critically important that you need to be thinking about is the fact that over 75% of the people that do a search on the search engine never go past the first page, what this is telling you is that your page, your website listed on page 3, 75% of the people are never going to get to you, your webpage is listed on page 2, 75% of the searchers are never going to get to you. So, if you look at that, it drops off really fast, the further back you are in the search engines. So, what this is telling you is that you really need to be on that front page.

In the internet world, keywords are like the hub of the wheel, everything rotates around that. Search engine optimization rotates around keywords, those are critically important during the hub to the wheel, Pay-Per-Click advertising, even if your ad working, social media marketing, YouTube videos out there, you really need to think about keywords because the whole internet world really revolves around keywords. So, keywords should be at the center of your marketing internet strategy and it is important to select the correct keywords, because, you want to select the keywords that will work for you and it will help make you successful.

How to Generate Good Keywords

The first thing you want to do is you want to start with a “seed list” and that's just going to be the result of your brainstorming. When you are brainstorming for keywords, you should ask yourself the following questions:

"If I was my customer, typing in a search, what would I be looking for to find my products or services?"

"What would I be typing into the search engine?"

And so you just sit down with a piece of paper and pencil and you can just make up this list and it does not need to be huge, but you need to come up with some good basic seed list, maybe 5, maybe 3, maybe 10, but just a good seed list of ideas that you have of what people are going to type in to your website, what they would be typing in to look for your products and services.

Once you got your seed list developed, the best thing to do is use the keyword generation tool and what that keyword generation tool will do is it will take the keywords that you've given it and it will go out and it will look at other websites using that same keyword and see if they are looking for any other keywords, so it will take that list of 2 or 3 or 5 whatever you got and it will give you back  a lot more keywords related to that or similar to that as well and there are a number of different keyword tools out there, probably one of the best is on Google, since Google is the biggest search engine out there. They produce more traffic that is probably a good tool to use is the Google keyword tool (Figure 2.0).

Figure 2.0 Google Keyword Tool

Google Keyword Tool

The easiest way to find the Google keyword tool is to type in and do a search on Google for keyword tool. You do not have to have a Google Adword account to use that tool, but the number of keywords that it gives back to you will vary, depending upon if you have Google Adwords account. It is not hard to set up a Google Adwords account so if you set up a Google Adwords account, it will give you back a lot more keywords than if you just use it as a non-registered user. Really, either way you are going to have more keywords than you need and it is pretty simple to use.

The hardest thing on this is, the very first time that you use it, you have to type in this code here and it gives you a whole list. Now, what you need to do is you need to take a look at those keywords and determine how you are going to look at it. Once you have used the Google keyword tool, it will give you three pieces of important information:

• The keywords
• The competition and how much competition is there
• The number of searches.

Those are the basic things that you need to look at to analyze which of these keywords are going to be the best for you. So, if you click on monthly searches, it will sort the list by the number of searches.

Criteria for Getting Good Keywords

1.    Keyword that has a large number of searches and typically, the more searches the better - In SEO, you don't want to spend your time going after keywords that are not getting any traffic to your website. You want to get websites that have a lot of traffic.

2.    Low competition - if you got a site that has a high number of searches on it, it's going to also have a high number of competitors and typically, when you look at the competition on the Google keyword tool, it is going to really give you a rough estimate of what the competition is. It's going to say, 'high’, ‘medium', or 'low' and that is pretty general and does not give you too much information about the searches. So one of the things that you should do is click on the competition column, and it will give you results that are high to low and if you click on it again, it will reverse the sorting order and it will give you from low to high results. So, you want to pick one of that have low competition.

Once you have done that you have to “weed” your list down. Remember, the criteria is low competition and high number of searches and instead of doing global, you might want to look at local searches depending upon where you are shipping your products. This gives you the basic tool for finding the keywords; you can go beyond that but if you just go that far you might want to quantum leap forward. Now, on that competition it will give you low, medium or high. If you take that keyword phrase, right under where you typed that in, it will give you exactly how many pages you are up against.

Now, if you want to get into more details, you can actually create yourself a ratio, you can do that in a spreadsheet or you can do it on a piece of paper with a calculator, anyway you want to do it. You pick those top keywords and you write in one column the number of searches that you've got. You find out exactly how many there are that you would be competing against and then you can divide the number of searches by the competition and that would give you a ratio. The ratio can help you figure out which one of these keywords would be the best. The formula is dividing the searches by competition and there are different ratios out there but this is the basic way to try to figure out which of these keywords mathematically is going to be your best bet.

Now, once you got that keyword list and you have weeded it out and you don’t want to go after too many keywords for a webpage. Typically, you want to have one main keyword and that is the one that you really are going after. If you just focus on that one and you may want to look at 2 or 3 others that are not as important keywords and you want to pick one that is your main keyword that you are going to go after.

There are other things that you can do to analyze in more details.  One of the other things that you can do is don't mess with keywords that does not have more than 80 searches a day. On the other side of the coin, don't mess with keywords that have more than 30,000 competing websites and you can do that manually with your calculator, you can figure that out from what we have shown you or there are actually some tools that will help do that for us and sometimes, if you got keywords, you might want to adjust these numbers a little bit until you can pick up some keywords that you want to. Just pick those main keyword and several other keywords.

Market Samurai

Market Samurai is a software that interfaces into your Google Adwords account and it will actually do the searches for you and bring the data back and gives you much more data and much more ability to analyze that data critically, to really pick the keywords. There are some things that this can do that are almost virtually impossible to do manually. The main selecting keywords based on number of searches versus the number of competition you can do manually fairly easy but this makes it easier for you. It will help you to determine the strength of the competitors for a particular keyword and these are the things that you should look at to determine how strong your competitors are.

Where to use your Keywords

In search engine optimization, there are some basic elements that help makes the site stronger and these are  things that you want to do to your website as well, to make your website stronger and make it stronger than the competition.

The first thing you want to look at is your on-site SEO elements. We will discuss this more when we go into the SEO basics topic. The first thing is where you use these keywords in your pages. The number one where you have to have your keyword is in the Title of your website, it appears at the top of the page, critically important that your keyword is in that title. You need to have your keywords in the heading or H1 tags, description, and there are other places where you need to have your keywords and depend upon the density of the keywords, how many you have in the page and it depends on the keyword placement and keyword proximity.

Keywords are also used for the off-site SEO elements. Off-site SEO elements are how many links do you have, how many other websites are pointing to you and have a link to your website and they also give all of those pages a PageRank from 1 to 10 and if you get a link from a website with a PageRank of 0, that is not incredibly helpful, it is better than nothing but it is not nearly as good as having a link from a site that has a PageRank of 6 or higher. That will give you much more clout from having backlinks from those kinds of sites.  

With social networks, this is becoming more and more important in what’s going on in the internet. Do you have links from Facebook sites? Links from educational sites? If you have your keywords in your domain name, then that is a thing in your favor and the same thing could be said for your competitors.