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7 Useful Keyword Research Checklist

George — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:54:25 +0000

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

George — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 05:09:37 +0000

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.

You can avail the services of any free or paid keyword research tool for your SEO activities. Once you have got a pretty good list of keywords from the keyword research tool, you need to find out the keywords which have a particular competition level that you think, you can overcome. If the competition is too high when compared with the monthly search count for that particular keyword, then there is no point in going after that keyword.

You need to get the exact competition for a particular keyword in the major search engines (here we take Google), by putting the search query in quotes. This will give you the competition number for that exact keyphrase you are trying to optimize your site for. If this figure is again too competitive for you, then there is one more option to check the best keywords for your site. This is done by using the “intitle” search feature of Google. By using this feature for searching your keywords, you would get a much better idea, on how many sites are having the particular keyword in their title and by having a look at those numbers, you can decide whether to go with that keyword or not.

For example is you are looking for the competition of the keyword “digital advertising company”, the regular way of doing it is to do an exact search for the keyword “digital advertising company”, which would give you a particular number. Since title tags are one of the most influential factors in better search engine rankings, it is better to find out the competition that exist in the title tags of different websites for that particular keyword. So here you can do a search (intitle:”digital advertising company”) in Google and you would get a result of various websites having the same keyphrase in its title. Having a look at the number of the occurrences of that keyword in the titles of various website, you can decide whether to chose that keyword or not.

Better Keyword Research With Google Adwords Keyword Tool – Video Tutorial

George — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 06:01:59 +0000

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.

So, to achieve a successful SEO campaign it is very much important to make sure that you have researched the right / potential keywords for your website. The keyword research part cannot be taken lightly as this is the major thing that influences the search engine performance of your website.

There are various keyword research tools available which helps you to do keyword research for your website. Some are free, which there are paid keyword research tools which gives you more deep and sophisticated keyword ideas. Of the free keyword research tools, my favorite is the Google Adwords keyword tool, which is more simple and easy to use. The Google Adwords Keyword tools is the most recommended one it is also considered as the best tool for beginners.

Even if this tool is free, you can do a great keyword research if you know how to use this tool efficiently. The tool shows many useful data which can help you in researching the keywords in a much better way. You can also export the keyword list which is yet another good feature of this keyword research tools.

Below is a small video clip tutorial, which teaches you how to do keyword research for your website using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I stumbled on this video clip while I was searching for something and thought that it would be good for those who would like to use this tool. So I decided to share this on my blog. Hope you enjoy it.

Effective Keyword Research for Better Search Engine Results

George — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:21:20 +0000

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.

Keyword research mainly includes the identification of the right keywords which are more suitable for your website, so that your website gets more chances for ranking in search engines for the selected keywords. After finalizing the keyword research process, you just need to start optimizing your website for these keywords.

Keyword research needs to be done with much precision and you need to study a lot about the website and the industry the website is related to. While doing a keyword research you should also need to take care of other factors affecting keywords such as location, seasonality etc. Most of the time keyword research is a semi automated process which requires manual research as well as automated work with the help of various tools.

There are quite a good list of keyword research tools and the first one that comes to my mind is the Google Keyword research tool which is very much easy to use and free of cost. This keyword tool gives search information for keywords such as its search volume, Avg CPC, competition etc. But these results are mainly based on Google search results. To get search results based on the other major search engines you needs to go further with some good paid keyword research tools.

Trellian is one such company which offers one of the best keyword research tools and I have found it really effective. It offers you one of the best keyword research and discovery tool known as KeywordDiscovery. I have been using it for the past few years along with other paid tools and I have found Trellian really useful and effective. Trellian offers a trial version of the Keyword Discovery Tool and if your are satisfied with the trial version then you can download the complete version for better keyword research.

Getting Your Keyword Research Right!!

George — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:08:20 +0000

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.

How to Calculate Google CPC for Your Keywords?

George — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:15:06 +0000

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.