Effective Keyword Research for Better Search Engine Results
Jun 07 2010
Posted by George as search engine marketing
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.
