RealWebMarketing.net: Advanced Keyword Selection Strategies - Part 1

Selecting the right keywords can be one of the most important aspects of search engine marketing. This is equally important for search engine optimization and for pay per click search engine marketing.

Research shows that a person who enters a 2 or 3 word keyword is quite a bit more likely to buy. So generally stay away from the single word keywords. Go for 2, 3 or 4 word keywords.

Starting Your List

There are many valid ways to study keywords and I’m going to discuss a number of them in this article series. The first step, as I’ve covered in other articles and in my books on Internet marketing, is to create a spreadsheet. In the first column put your keywords. Here are some tips for coming up with keyword ideas:

1. Go to your company web site and see if whoever designed it placed any well though out keywords in the metatags section of the code on the home page. Of course if it was you who designed it, you will be the one who came up with that list. Go to the home page, then select View | Source. Add those to your spreadsheet.

2. Brainstorm for types of phrases someone might type in at a search engine to find your type of product. Add those to your spreadsheet.

3. Select 4-5 competitor web sites, and go to those web sites and see what keywords they have used in their metatags. Add those to your spreadsheet.

Evaluating the Keywords

By now you should have some keywords in your spreadsheet, and you’ll add more as you go through the rest of these steps. But how do you evaluate the data there? Which keywords are better? Which keywords are a must have? Which keywords should be thrown in the trash? Properly evaluating the list of keywords is vital to your success in either SEO or pay per click search engine marketing.

We’ll now discuss some free tools you can use to evaluate the importance or value of the keywords. These include:

1. The monthly number of searches on the Yahoo network, shown by their online tool 2. The number of people using those keywords to find your site over the last few months 3. Your ranking for those keywords on Google 4. The Google Page Rank of the top site on Google for that keyword 5. The type of sites coming up on organic or paid search listings for that keyword

I’ll explain each of these methods in detail. You don’t have to use them all, but some have more or less usefulness in certain situations.

Number of Searches on Yahoo

The very first thing you should do, now that you have spreadsheet started, is to go to the Overture Keyword Selection Tool, which can be found at: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Enter a keyword or key phrase in that online tool, and it will tell you how many people have searched for that keyword on Yahoo over the last month. You can generally figure that the total number of people who searched for that term on the whole Internet in the last month is about three times that amount, since Google has about twice the traffic as Yahoo.