Article in SEO

Keyword research is probably one of the most important steps in a successful optimization campaign, and it is usually one of the 1st steps any optimization campaign starts with.

Keyword research refers to the process of finding the candidate terms that internet searchers search for to find your products or services, during this process you try to find the mostly used terms (popular terms) that people use, as well as the not so popular terms, as we will explain later on in this article, it is important to target both popular (completive) keywords as well as less popular keywords.

The 1st step

So whets the 1st step in the keyword research process? 1st of all lets think of your target audience, who are they? what would those people search for if they are looking for something you sell? think of those words and right them down, this will be our 1st keyword list that we will start diving into for more research.

Once we compiled this list of possible search phrases, we select each term and use one of the tools below to find more search phrases from this term, their popularity and search frequency.

I usually use a number of tools to research keywords:

1- Overture search term suggestion tool. http://www.inventory.overture.com

2- Wordtracker. http://www.wordtracker.com

3- Digital Point keyword research tool, which uses the result from the above two tools. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion

There is a big number of other keyword research tools, however these tools will provide you with the information you need for most of your research needs.

The 2nd step

Use one of these tools to compile a larger list of suggested keywords, if you started with 10 keywords in your initial keyword list, you probably will end up with anywhere between 50 and 100 keywords/phrases.

We now need to select a number of keywords from this list, to help you with the selection, cross off the ones that:

1- Have no relevancy for what you offer, lets take the example of a web hosting company offering shared web hosting plans starting at $10/month, in this case, the phrase cheap Linux web hosting is not relevant and should be removed from the list.

2- Either have a very big search frequency that your budget cant handle, or have very little/no search frequency.

The 3rd step

You now should have a shorter list after crossing out all the words as explained in the 2nd step, we will now have a look at the competition each keyword has, who's targeting those keywords and how much websites are targeting those terms.

1- Head to Google and type: intitle:your keyword (replace your keyword with the keywords you are targeting, one at a time)

The idea of the above command is to see the number of websites that have your keyword/phrase in their title, since their is a bigger chance of sites that actually have the keyword in the title to be targeting this term, a simple search of the keyword alone is not an accurate measurement of the number websites targeting this keyword since the number of results will include websites that mention the keyword in their text body.

An example of this, I got 71,700,000 results when searching for "free Linux hosting" however when searching for intitle:free linux hosting I got 1,720,000 results!

2- Also on Google type: inanchor:your keyword, this will also show us the number of websites that have the keyword in their anchor text, another way of checking the websites targeting the keyword.

3- Use on of the above 2 methods, and have a look at the 1st 10 results for each keyword, check out the website's Google Page Rank, number of back links and how long has the website been established, this should give you a clear idea of the competition your up against for each on of those keywords. Installing the Google toolbar would be a good idea to help you save some time.

You now should have a good idea about what keywords to target and what to leave, keyword research is a lengthy process, but these are the important steps any webmaster should do before starting with any onsite or off-site optimization.