Keyword Research For The Beginner
By Sandi Krakowski
Keyword research will help you to compete in the marketplace. Knowing what keywords your competitors use can help you to gain momentum quickly in the search engines.
When you write your blog posts, submit your articles to places like EZine Articles, when you upload your videos to YouTube and Vimeo these keywords will be very important.
A simple and easy tool to use online for this research is Spyfu.
Spyfu allows you to enter a domain or a keyword and find the SEO value, Organic Traffic value and more. If you’ve ever wanted to see what your competitors were paying for their ads in PPC and what keywords they were using, this is the way to do it.
What if you could be a ‘fly on the wall’ of your competition and find out what works and what doesn’t when they do their online marketing?
Spyfu enables you to do all of this.
When you start out doing keyword research you could get sidetracked however thinking that by using every single keyword anyone in your niche is using you’ll rise to the top. This is not true. In a WordPress platform you could actually be accused of keyword stacking if you do that. But finding the top 10-20 keywords will serve you well.
Look for the keywords that are not being used generically everywhere else.
For example I have a client who manufacturers beautiful Italian Leather handbags. Using a keyword such as handbags is far too generic. She creates handbags with custom photos on the fabric, which is very unique. So photo handbags is a great keyword for her. When we did extensive searching on Spyfu we also found that keyword reversals would work well, such as handbag photos. Little did she know that people were actually searching for these words reversed. Allot of people!
We also discovered her competitors were using words such as photo bags, cosmetic photo bags and personalized photo handbags. These were quickly implemented into her blog and her website.
Being able to find these keywords, review the PPC ads that were being used by her competitors and then taking action to position herself accordingly proved to be very profitable.
When you write your articles in your WordPress blog, don’t forget to use these keywords in your SEO description, title tag and keyword section. Also use these keywords in the post tags area. Google will find you more quickly and so will everyone looking for what you offer.
Don’t make any assumptions when it comes to what your ideal clients might be putting into a search engine to find you. You may know what your site is about and how you, the site owner, would find it, but it's different when it comes to predicting how a paying customer would go about looking for it.
Remember as well that just because you think people will find you with a specific keyword doesn’t mean they are. As we discussed in my last newsletter, being the top listing means nothing if no one is searching for you with those terms. It’s a waste of time and money.
Pay attention to what SpyFu shows you as the other organic and paid keywords people enter when looking for your product or service. Use these words as well in your blog posts and meta descriptions.
Something many beginning marketers buy into is the thought that ‘more is better’. This is not true when it comes to using your keywords on your blog. Be careful to stay away from “Keyword stacking”. This would mean writing an article on WordPress Training and using the words WordPress and WordPress Training 39 places in the article. This will actually create a penalty for you from Google. Not a good thing.
Your page content isn't the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:
* Title Tag
* Meta Description Tags
* Headings
* Alt text
* Anchor Text/ Navigational Links
You've spent a lot of time finding your keywords; make sure you use them in all the appropriate fields to get the maximum benefit.
Lastly, don’t forget to use your SEO plugins and tools that WordPress offers. We’ve talked about them quite a bit in the last few weeks. A tool like Scribe SEO will show you additional keywords you might want to pull into your post tags once you have written your articles. It will show you how many anchor text links you’ll want. This is your best tool for making sure all of your hard work is puling together and creating the most optimized content possible.
Take action in your business, do the things that create profits and you’ll end up with a legacy to build!
