How
do I find out the best keywords to target?
The "best" keyword depends on
the following main factors:
1.) The amount of traffic it will generate.
2.) The difficulty of attaining a top ranking.
3.) The profitability of that keyword.
In this answer I will address each point
and give recommendations on tools to use
to help you in your assessment.
The Amount of Traffic it Will Generate.
Often people choose keywords based on how
popular they think they may be. Mostly it
is based on "real world" factors
rather then fact which is readily available.
For instance, I recently saw someone who
proposed they were going to go after the
term "nursing homes" due to the
aging population.
Although this area may be growing quickly,
those interested in finding out more information
often do not use a computer or if they did,
would not be researching it online. Although
they would still get visitors, they would
find there are much better keywords to target
with profit in mind. When it comes to traffic,
the best measurement is actual searches.
This will tell you how many people search
in a day or month for that term and it can
be a great indicator. There are tools for
finding popular key words, most notably
Wordtracker and Overture. These tools combines
the two most popular ways of judging popularity,
Wordtracker and Overture. In addition, it
suggest related keywords and lists their
traffic. Always remember however, that this
is total searches. These search numbers
will always be divided among the SERPs.
The Difficulty of Attaining a Top Ranking
If you simply chose the keywords with highest
amount of traffic, you could still lose
money. This is because these keywords typically
warrant a lot more work to rank for. A perfect
keyword is one that has a lot of searches
but little SEO competition and moderate
to easy to rank for.
There are also keywords where you may get
1000s of visitors with only one conversion
while others where you can achieve 1 for
every 100. This should be factored in as
unless you make your money per impression,
you want the highest number of conversions
per visitor. The best way I know to evaluate
this is to run an AdWords account. The amount
of data you receive by starting a campaign
can be very useful in establishing the conversion
rate. I believe it is always better to spend
$10 to find out a keyword isn't profitable
then to spend 6 months getting it to number
one, THEN find out its a dog.
The moral of the story is although there
is no such thing as a "perfect"
keyword, you can find the best ones for
you by using a combination of the factors
above.
How
do I get my web site to show up in the search
engines?
As you might have noticed the submit URL
function on the major search engines does
not really help that much.
The best way to get your web site listed
faster in the search engines is to get links
to it from authority web sites (those with
high PageRank).
By getting a great link from for example
the home page of an established PageRank
7 web site can make your new web site and
it's subpages indexed in a matter of hours.
If this is not an option for you then other
good ways is to put a link to it from big
forums signature, directories, friends sites
etc.
If you wonder why only the home page is
listed and not the rest it is because the
search engine spiders first visits one time
and then comes back for a "deep crawl".
To speed up this process, the solution is
to get more links to your site.
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