One of the most important aspects of a successful online project is choosing the right keywords. If you choose the wrong one, you might get ranked in just a few weeks, only to find out that no one is buying with that keyword. Choose another and you may find that after 3 years of hard work, the competition is just too rediculous.
The first thing I do is head over to Google’s Keyword Tool. Once there you can type in a keyword, and get info on approximately how many searches are done on the term every month, what kind of competition there is, trends and more.
After I enter my keyword, I click on the words, “Global Monthly Searches” which will arange all the keywords from most searched for at the top to less searched for at the bottom. From here you’ll pretty much know which search terms are getting the kind of traffic that you’re looking for. Personally I wouldn’t ever target a search term with less than 2800 monthly searches, but everyone kinda has their own number they think is best.
To the right of the keyword you’ll see a small icon of a graph with a magnifying glass on it. Right click that and open it into a new window, and you’ll get some really good info on the trends of the keyword, and who(or where) is searching for your keyword. This can come in really helpful, especially if you’re using ppc adds that allow you to choose the region you’re advertising to.
Once I think I have a handful of good keywords, I head over to normal google and do a few searches to check out the competition. I use Firefox, a free internet web browser, with an addon called Seo for Firefox. It shows the PR, age, and a lot of other info on the google search.
I also do a backlink check on the top results at Backlinkwatch. One thing to keep in mind is that you’ll never get the full amount of backlinks that a site has. I’ve found backlink searches on my websites only show about 10% of the actual backlinks. So keep that in mind.
After the keyword research, and backlink checks I’ll have a good idea about how good a keyword is and if it is something that I would like to pursue or not. If you find that all the “good keywords” are over crowded, do a little research on the subject, reading in the forums, and see what kinds of problems the people are having, and plug those into the keyword tool.
