Getting Great KeywordsWhy Keywords are ImportantIf
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 KeywordsThe
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 ToolThe
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 Keywords1.
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 SamuraiMarket 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 KeywordsIn
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.
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