How to Find the Best Keywords for SEO

Once you understand why a keyword strategy is needed it's time to get to work by creating a list of the phrases you are going to target.  In the beginning you are going to want to throw out as many ideas as possible.  Don't worry about competitiveness of the term for now, instead focus on creating as large a list of possibilities as you can.  Here are the best ways to start your discover process.

1.  What is Your Product or Service About?

Your major search terms are going to be focused on the main product, solution, or information that you deliver.  You should have anywhere from 3-10 different majors keywords that describe your site.  These can either be one word ideas or commonly used phrases and will drive most of your homepage anchor text efforts.  My site is about "Internet marketing" and "making money online."

Tip:  Remember, keep all of your terms relevant for what you are providing.  I could probably get a lot of traffic for "make money online with surveys" but I do not have any kind of content on my site to help someone interested in that.  Only go after keywords that you can provide the searcher what they are looking for.

2.  Categories

How are you going to organize your content?  What are the common themes you are going to be talking about with the articles that you write?  On my site I break it up into different categories of Internet marketing like keywords, search engine optimization, email marketing, conversion, outsourcing, analytics, and pay-per-click.

3.  Brainstorming the Categories

Once you have the categories down it's time to really get down to the core terms that you are going to target.  These are the two-to-four word phrases that you want to use to attract targeted traffic.  These are the most popular phrases describing your categories.  You'll want 10-20 in all and you will organize them into each category.

For example on my main keyword landing page I would go for "keyword strategy" or "keyword guide" as an example.  I always start with two or three keywords that I am going to start targeting and focus my efforts on those specific terms until I hit the front page.  Then you can move on to trying to get the page to rank for other relevant terms.

4.  Will Users Search for the Plural or Singular Version?

Once you start figuring out your list of keywords, check to see if the singular or plural version makes sense.  If it does, you might as well try to rank for both of them.  For something like "article marketing" some people might search for "articles marketing" but not enough for it to be worth my time.

5.  Use Tools

Using your brain and coming up with every single keyword that you possibly can to describe what kind of information you provide or will be providing is the best way to get started.  After you have a nice list there are a few tools that you can use to help you discover some related terms.  Personally, I recommend the Google Keyword Tool over anything else.

Type in your keywords, select "exact" from the match types category, and see what else comes up.  The best part is that it gives you the traffic numbers for both your keyword and the related ones, so you can see just how much traffic you could expect to get from it.  Those numbers aren't going to be exact, but it's a good rough estimate.

6.  Using Keywords for Content Ideas

By using your own brainstorming and the keyword tool you will be able to group together keywords.  When you have three or more variations of basically the same kind of search term, you want to make sure you create a page and start targeting those searchers.  Let's take a look at my "keywords" category.  By using the tools I can see several different topics I can cover under like strategy, tools, density, and finder.  All of those keywords turn into content ideas and pages on my site.  Who knows, if you plug those specific keywords into the tool above you can maybe even drill down further.

7.  Are You Local?

If you have a small brick and mortar shop then you are more than likely serving your local community, especially if you are service based.  Make sure you include local modifiers to all your keywords.  City, state, county, suburbs, or any local terms used to describe the geography can help drive you more targeted traffic.

8.  Brand Names

Do you sell or review a particular product?  Then you will need to target those terms.  If I am reviewing someone's SEO tool you can bet that I put the name of their product in my title and try to rank for "(product name) review."

9.  Misspellings

Don't worry about typos or common misspellings of the words.  Search engines are figuring out what users mean and fixing their mistakes for them.

10.  Modifier Tool

If you have a lot of modifiers (words like "free," "buy," or colors) that you can attach to keywords, use our easy keyword generator to come up with long tail terms.

After going through our list you should have plenty of keywords that you are ready to target for your SEO and PPC efforts.

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts