How To Get Golden Keywords for Marketing Research

Just about any of your internet marketing efforts begin with finding keywords that people are actually searching for that you can use to get traffic. One of the most solid ways to get visitors to your website is through the search engines.

Start your research by brainstorming a list of keyword phrases that match what your website will be about or what you believe people are searching for when you want them to find your website. I've found that using a spreadsheet is the best way to keep track of your keywords. If you don't currently own Microsoft Office, you can use Google Docs or OpenOffice.

From the more broad keyword phrases, you'll be able to take more specific keyword phrases that indicate individuals being more apt to take action or buy products or services from you. For instance, someone that searches for "mp3 players" isn't as ready to actually buy an mp3 player versus someone who searches for "32GB iPod Touch 2nd Gen". Now, when you end up reviewing the competition for these keywords, there are millions of pages using the keyword phrases "mp3 players" but only a few thousand pages that use "32GB iPod Touch 2nd Gen".

There are a couple of websites that can be used to determine how many searches are done on a monthly basis. Once you determine this, add this information to your spreadsheet. It will come in handy when you need to see which keywords are worth pursuing vs. those that will be a waste of time. The two websites that you'll be using are Google Adwords keyword tool and the freekeywords.wordtracker.com website. Both of these will give you keyword ideas and the number of monthly searches.

With the reports on how many searches per month you'll have from the free tools, you'll also need to find the competition. The easiest way to do this is to find out how many websites Google or the other search engines have in their index that contain that keyword phrase. The less competition, the better.

There are some search parameters that you can use, especially with Google that will give you some indications of how much competition there really is for these keyword phrases. If you do searches with the allintitle or allinanchor options with your keyword phrases, you'll have an especially good idea of which of those keyword phrases you should go after with your website.

When evaluating which keywords are "good" keywords or good keyword phrases, you can usually tell after you've been doing this a while. I usually start with keyword phrases that get at least 100 searches per day. Obviously the more searches per day, the better. As far as competition, I usually look for keyword phrases with less than 10,000 allintitle results. The lower the competition, the better.

Finding keywords is just the start. Once you have your keyword phrases, you'll need to place those strategically in your web pages including in the page title, h1 tags, and within the content of the page itself. Ideally, you'll have about a 3-5% keyword density. What this means is that you'll use your 2-3 word keyword phrase about 1-2 times for every 100 words. If you have a few paragraphs in your blog post or your web page, plan on about 1 keyword phrase per paragraph. If you use those keyword phrases in the right way, you'll be on your way to getting those top rankings.