Find Great Keywords For Your Website

This post is one of seven steps listed on this page: Really Make Money Online. If you haven’t already done so I recommend that you read the entire post to get the general overview of the plan.

As we did our research on finding a good niche to create a website around, we also were looking at potentially good keywords and products. Once you’ve established that there are sell-able products in a niche and have a basic keyword list it’s time to really refine that key word list down to get you the best SERP positions for the best keywords. SERP stands for “Search Engine Results Page”.

We need to look at what keywords sell, what the competition is doing and whether or not we can dominate the niche. It’s important at this point to realize that we may be building a site that only gets a thousand visits a month and perhaps only 3 or 4 sales. That is not a failure. Once you’ve establish one site that makes money, simply move on and build another. It’s truly the cumulative effect we are after. I want to dominate the search results one keyword at a time. In fact, I may build several sites around the same product and niche so I can dominate multiple keywords individually.

Back to keyword research. You have your list of potential keywords. We’ve already established that there are some with decent search numbers and limited competition. These are our “fall back” keywords. If we don’t find anything better we will use these. At this point what I usually do is go back to the Google keyword tool, and open up a Google search page and start again. First thing I do is type one of my keywords in the search engine and I look at the sponsored links (the ones on the right). I then visit each link and take note of the website urls of the sites that seems to have good sales page. Does the page make me want to buy the product?. Next, I take that url and plug it into Google keyword tool searching on the website address instead of keywords I put in. The results will be a list of keywords that Google feels match this site.

Look over this list very carefully and only choose keywords that make sense to you as being relevant to the niche. Write them down for each site you feel is worthy. OK. Now what I do next is type in one of my keyword phrases into the search engine in quotes, and then do the same thing the first couple of sites that come up in the organic results (left column). This may be even more important as these are sites Google thinks match your keyword. And part of that matching process is the other keywords on the site. For any particular keyword there are a number of relevant keywords that the search engine expects to find on that page. You will need to pepper your site content with these keywords even if they are not the ones you are optimizing for.

Here’s another great keyword tip. Take the URLs of the top results from Google and plug them in at Alexa.com.  Alexa will give you a list of the keywords that are sending the most traffic to the site and also which ones are sending traffic that are consider high ranking keywords. This enables you to see if your page one competition is actually getting traffic form the keyword or not.

Repeat this process with a few other keywords until you have relevant list of about 20 or 30 keywords. Next take all of those keywords and plug them into the keyword tool and look at the monthly search numbers. If there is less than thousand throw them out. Not worth my time.

A word on Google’s keyword tool. Often times the keyword tool will give you results of keyword phrases that seem out of order. I usually throw these out especially if the result numbers match those same keywords in the correct order. An example of this would be “loss weight for men” and “weight loss for men”. I found these in a keyword search result with the exact same number of searches listed. I doubt any one actually types in the first phrase, so I ignored it. You should do the same with any phrase that pops up that doesn’t seem like natural speaking because it probably is a bad result. If you try and dominate that keyword phrase because there’s no competition, you’ll most likely find there’s no traffic either.

Back to analyzing your keyword competition. There are two ways that I search for competition and of course they both take place on the magical Google. First thing I do is type each keyword phrase into the search engine in quotes again and look at the number of pages returned. These are pages that Google feels are targeted to that exact keyword phrase. Write it down. Next I use the “allintitle” filter.  Put this in the search box: allintitle: “keyword phrase”. If you put your keyword phrase in quotes it returns all the pages that have all of the words in the title. If you leave the quotes off it returns all of the pages that have that exact keyword phrase in that exact order in the page title. The lower the result number from your allintitle filter search  is compared to your search with just the keyword in quotes, the easier it will be to dominate that keyword phrase.

I see a lot of light bulbs above heads lighting up. Yes, this is your real competition. Google places a very high importance on page title. If you have very little competition for a keyword phrase in the page title you really only have to concentrate on your website SEO and your content to grab a page one search result location.

If this is your first site I really suggest that you focus on the least amount of competition rather than higher search numbers. Getting on page one of Google is a really encouraging feeling and I believe 100% in positive reinforcement. Being successful with your first attempt at dominating a keyword is going to keep you motivated to build more sites and ultimately the more you build the more money you will make online.

You now should have all the tools you need to get started on proper keyword research. If you would like to take a short there are many keyword tools you can buy at there that will shorten this process up for you. Once you’ve established some online income, you will no doubt want to buy one of these to save time. My recommendation is  InstaCash Keywords 

The reason I recommend this is that I spent more time doing keyword research on my successful sites than I did actually writing content.  By providing new keyword lists for niches people are actually searching for , you can get right to the business of building the sites. The two guys behind this are actually two of the most respected keyword guys in the business. While this won’t fit into everyone budget right now, you should at least take the seven day trial and see if it will save you time.