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Thursday, February 4, 2010

Keyword Research - Internet Marketing For Beginners

You have a website. You are selling the best gadget around. But in order to succeed you should get visitors to your website. You need traffic. Nobody knows about your product or website. You depend on web searches, or more precisely, on web search engines. They should have your website indexed and display it among search results. But not just any search results. Your page should be displayed when somebody searches for keywords that are relevant to your website.  The key to online success are right keywords. You should target keywords that people use to find things. Of course, your product should be something people need and are looking to buy. Otherwise even the best keywords will not help you. But how do you know what are people looking for? The answer is called keyword research. The best approach is to do keyword research before you start with an online project. But even if you already have a website you can optimize it with content about popular keywords. How can you find them?

You can do it manually. But analyzing each keyword, counting backlinks and estimating competition is a very time consuming task. The best approach is to use a dedicated tool like Market Samurai. Market Samurai has (almost) everything you need for internet marketing. It is a great keyword research and search engine competition analysis software. With it you can easily find right keywords you should target. How do you use it?  Using Market Samurai is very simple. You create a project around a root keyword. This is the keyword that describes your market, for example "used cars". Market samurai will help you to find keywords (search phrases) that are related to your market, in this case to used cars. Your goal should be to select keywords for which you could rank on the first page of Google search results. You need to look for keywords that have some number of daily searches, have little or weak competition and there should be some advertisers advertising for this keyword.

The number of searches is pretty obvious. If nobody searches for some keyword then it makes no sense to target this keyword. The more search volume, the more traffic could come to your website. As a rule of thumb you should look for keywords that have at least 100 daily searches. The strength of the competition is not so obvious parameter. In order to reach top position on the search results page there should be very few other pages competing for the same keyword. Because if there is a strong competition you will never reach high ranking which consequently means lower traffic to your website. To evaluate the competition for particular keyword, Market Samurai provides an excellent matrix of key properties for top 10 websites ranking for particular keyword. You should have a little knowledge about SEO to decide if this is a "go" or "no go" case, but even for beginners it is easy to check the number of backlinks and PageRank.
The third criteria is the market for this keyword. If there are no advertisers then it is very likely that this keyword is not interesting. Once you find a keyword that passes all tests you should use it to create a web page around it. Don't forget to publish only original quality content. A few backlinks and you are done! If your judgment was right then you will shortly rank for this keyword. The author is a big fan of Google and and internet marketing. His latest project is the http://hydronicfloorheating.org/ website which explains advantages of hydronic floor heating, a type of radiant heating.