Keyword research is the most integral part of your SEO campaign and the keyword research plays an influential role in determining the SEO success of any website. Websites which have been optimized with a well-researched keyword set is sure to go up in the search engine rankings, where as a website with a poor keyword research would find it difficult to reach anywhere in the search engine rankings. Keyword research comes in the initial phase of an SEO campaign and make sure that keyword research is carried out in the best way for your website’s success.
Since the SEO industry is growing considerably and becoming more competitive, the keyword research has also become tougher when compared with the initial times. A lot of methods and checklists are being implemented to make the keyword research as good as possible. It is very much difficult to follow all the parameters and criteria while doing a keyword research, but there are certain checklists which are simple and form the basis of a good keyword research.
Here are few of the basic keyword research checklists that you need to take follow and which would help you in conducting a decent keyword research for your website.
1) Identifying the Potential Keywords
Before starting your keyword research, you should identify your top potential keywords and start building your keywords based on that. You should not make any false assumptions on your potential keywords and you should be very careful when deciding about your potential keywords, as your keyword research list would be based on the main keywords.
2) Studying the Search Count of Keywords
By having a look at the search count of your keywords, you would be getting a better idea about better you can benefit if you optimize your website based on that particular keyword. So always go for search count that has a pretty good search count and are very much relevant to your products or services mentioned on the website.
3) The Competition for your Keywords
The competition for your keywords would give you an idea about how easily you can optimize the website based on the keywords and while taking keywords make sure it has realistic competition count so that the chances of optimizing your website for that keyword would be high.
4) Finalization of the Keywords
Once the list is complete, go through the list once more, have discussion and remove or add any keywords that might argue well for your website search engine performance. You may go through your keyword list several times, to get it finalized.
5) Your Current Ranking for The Keywords
Once you keywords are finalized, you should take the current search engine ranking for those keywords and use it as a benchmark keyword ranking report for the future. You can use this report as a yardstick to measure the effectiveness of your search engine optimization activities.
6) The Relevant Pages on the Websites for the Finalized Keywords
Next, you should find and identify the relevant pages on the website which can be optimized with the keywords in the list. For this you can make a set out of your keywords that should go with a particular page or section of the website.
7) The Potential Keywords that do not have Content or pages on the website
There might be certain keywords, which you think have high potential, but do not have the relevant content on the website. Identify such keywords, sort it down and send across the content development team to get the relevant content based on those keywords.
Checking the Keyword Competition in a Much Better Way
Jul 28 2011
Posted by George as Search Engine Optimization
Keyword competition is a factor that plays a major role in your keyword research. On the other hand Keyword research is the backbone of any SEO campaign and if you have done a decent keyword research, then you are half way through in your keyword research. So while doing keyword research for your tool, you need to give attention to various sensitive factors.
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Better Keyword Research With Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Video Tutorial
Jul 08 2011
Posted by George as Google
Keyword Research is one of the building blocks of an SEO campaign and the success of the SEO campaign for any website mainly depends on the keyword research part. If the right keywords are researched and selected, then the chances of increasing the search engine visibility of a website is high. On the other part if the keyword research part goes wrong, then whole of the SEO campaign would end on a disastrous note.
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Effective Keyword Research for Better Search Engine Results
Jun 07 2010
Posted by George as Search Engine Optimization
A proper Keyword research is the most essential ingredient of a successful SEO campaign. An expertise keyword research professional can very well determine the fate of your search engine rankings. So keyword research is the vital part of SEO which needs to be done with care, patience and skil.
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Websites have fastly become the major source of business for all the major companies and organizations. To have a website which is very much successful in generating sales and business, one needs to generate traffic to the site. In the end it is not just about generating traffic, but qualified traffic or genuine traffic.
Search engines are the most stable and major source of traffic generation and are capable of generating potential traffic to your website. The traffic from search engines is mainly based on keywords, and hence your site should be well optimized with the best possible keywords.
The website gets more qualified from search engine traffic if proper search engine optimization (SEO) is done, which means optimizing the site with potential keywords. Here comes the role of selecting better keywords or a better keyword research. Keyword research is the basic pillar of a well optimized website, and should be done with utter care. A website with a bad keyword selection would certainly be a flop in getting targeted search engine traffic. Keywords serve as the foundation for your online marketing strategy and you are advised to take time on doing a decent research on the keywords and phrases.
In selecting keywords there are many steps to be followed and it depends upon the nature of your business. The main thing to take care while doing keyword research is that you should try to thing as a visitor or a customer. You should try to think and find out what a visitor searches over the net, in order to arrive at your website. The best keywords that you can get for your website is from your customers and for that you have to think from a different level.
Once you have got a set of keywords, the next job is to evaluate and extract the most suited keywords. Extraction of keywords is based on many factors such as the competition of the keyword, its popularity / search count and more. The most popular keyword have a better chance being searched in a search engine, and if your website comes on top with that keyword you have more chances of getting traffic. While choosing keywords, it would be better to stick with specific keywords, rather than general keywords. The reason behind this is that a traffic that comes with a specific keyword has more chances of purchasing anything from your website. The traffic from generic keywords need not necessarily bring any sales or purchase from you site.
Consider the case where you have attained top search engine ranking with your keyword “shoe manufacturer“, even though you specializes only in the manufacturing of shoe soles. Even though the keyword “shoe manufacturer” is a popular keyword, it would not help in bringing and potential customers to your site. But consider the keyword “shoe sole manufacturer“, which is more industry specific. This keyword may rank lower in the keyword popularity than the previous keyword, but this keyword has more potential in bringing sales. The visitors coming with these keywords are more potential buyers.
You can also take the help of various keyword research tools and software available, some of which are paid and some are free. After finalizing your keywords, you have to continuously analyze your keywords in various search engines as the stats of the keywords changes frequently.
CPC stands for Cost Per Click, and is defined as the amount of money any advertiser has to pay search engines for single clicks on its advertisement placed on that particular search engine or advertisement media. CPC differs for different keywords, and also differ in various search engines. In CPC you need to pay the search engines only if you Ad is clicked, and the amount needed to be payed is decided at the time of keyword bidding for any particular keyword. Keyword bidding is done using different keyword research tools and we can decide on the keywords and the amount that has to be payed for each click.
Here I would like to write something about CPC in Google and the way to find the CPC amount for a particular keyword. Google offers a free keyword research tool, and is commonly known as Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Just go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and you can enter the keywords and get different information regarding those keywords.
The steps are given below.
1) Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and enable the Descriptive words or phrase radio button.
2) Enter Your Keyword, e.g “affiliate marketing” in the text box provided and press the button named Get Keyword Ideas.
3) Now you will get a list of information related to that keyword with information such as Advertiser competition, local search volume, global monthly search etc.
4) On the top of the table there is a drop down box named Choose columns to display. From that box select Show Estimated Average CPC option. Now a new field named “Estimated Avg. CPC” will be seen, which contains the average Cost Per Click for that amount.
5) Usually in India the Indian Rupees is the default currency type. If you want to change it to other currencies you can change it from the drop down box which appears on the top of this table.
6) By executing a single click on the Estimated Avg. CPC link, you can get the list in the reverse order of CPC.
I hope this would provide useful for those beginners in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but for those experts in PPC this would not provide enough.
