Whenever you’re discussing Search engine optimization you should begin with keyword research due to the fact that any time you don’t get this right everything else is going to be off as well. I can’t stress this strongly enough- if you foul up your keyword research you’ll be unsuccessful, do it properly and everything else is a piece of cake.You really can learn SEO.
For those who are unfamiliar with keyword phrases these are the words and phrases folks put in the search box of Google or another engine to locate the things they are trying to find. Any time I use “keyword” here it’s going to mean both single keywords as well as keyword phrases.
If you are going to do keyword research you are going to need a good keyword tool. I use Market Samurai myself but have also heard go things about Keyword Elite. Both of these tools are over $100 and come with a free trail period. If that seems to steep for your wallet you can use the Google keyword tool for your traffic research and do the competition research manually. Some people also like Micro Niche Finder but I don’t feel it gives you all the competition information you need to make an informed decision.
As you do your SEO keyword research there are two factors to take into consideration: a) Is there enough traffic for the keyword to be worth while and, b) the level of competition. Lets look at traffic first.
This point right here can save you a lot of headaches- always do your research in exact match. Both phrase match and broad match will not tell you the actual traffic a keyword receives, only exact match. For myself I never go after a keyword unless there is at the very least one hundred searches per day in exact match. This of course is just the low end and doesn’t mean you should not try to find keywords with more traffic.
As for competition this is where the actual SEO comes into play and it will be up to you to decide what level of competition you are willing to go up against. You are going to need to analyze the sites that are on the first page of Google to determine the competitiveness of your chosen keyword, a good keyword tool will make this job much easier.
Some say all you need to do is search for you keyword in quotes and if the number of sites returned is under a certain amount you are good to go. This may be true it may not be. If there are only 100 sites returned and 25 of them are high Page Rank sites with thousands of good anchor-text one way back links and all have good on-page optimization do you think it will be easy to get on the first page? It’s work but do your competion analysis the right way.
The most important factor when analyzing the sites already on the first page is links (to the page not the site) and the anchor text for those links. After that you’ll want to look at on-page factors, page rank and .edu/.gov links. I really can’t get into numbers here because you can rank for anything, it just depends on how hard you are willing to work. Let’s just say if they have not worked all that hard you won’t have to either. Follow this for the best SEO course.
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