The Importance of Keyword Research
Step #7
What is the importance of keyword research? This is the first really significant process that you are going to apply. The result of this task could well determine if your niche will be profitable or not.
Before we actually begin our keyword research, please read the two posts listed under Keyword Research — “Why” and “What is Relevant”.
You also need to make your decision about which niche you are going to do first.
Remember, if you have questions don’t let them go unanswered. Go to Wizard’s Classroom at Website Wealth Wizards Forum.
What is Relevant? According to Google
People in general know nothing about the algorithm that runs the search engines. Many of you don’t know what an algorithm is. I really count myself among that group even though I know it has something to do with statistical analysis.
The information about using the search engines to their best advantage (optimization) is really only derived by the author’s personal experience and an effort to predict what the “robots” will do next. No one has access to behind the scenes knowledge.
The formula that calculates who is listed at the top of the search results keeps changing. As people find new ways to “cheat” to improve their website ranking, methods of calculating relevance also change. What made your website #1 yesterday might not be a factor today.
The internet is constantly growing. Therefore, that means the number of matching search results goes up. This factor in itself is enough to cause you to lose rank for specific keywords.
Backlinks — The Most Important Factor For Search Engine Results?
Ask most experts this question and the resounding answer is YES! However, not all backlinks carry the most weight. A backlink ha two important parts.
The importance of the website linking to you – A page’s importance is rated in PR (Page Rank) which is a number value assigned to a website, on a scale of 0 to 10 with 10 being the best.
How the link to your website appears to the search engine — The search engine cannot read images so the use of an image (even your logo) as a link to your site does not register.
As long as there are words in the link, the search engine will be able to read it. However, words like “Click Here” make the link relatively useless.
If you use a high traffic keyword phrase, the search engine will get your URL and any of the associated terms. You control the words you use for the anchor text. The more places link to you with relevant terms in the anchor test, the better the chances of a high listing for those keywords.
What Else Moves Me To The Top?
Yes, it is important to have a term for which users searched but that is not all there is to it. Some of the other factors are: page keyword density, page title, and font size.
Basic Rules
If a keyword is listed in the meta tags, it should appear in the page body.
The text in the title of the page should appear on the page.
Bold, italicized, underlines, and heading text are considered more important and therefore give you more relevance.
The title of the page holds the most weight with keywords.
Make sure keywords are in the Meta Tag, title and page body.
Keyword Research — Why?
Keywords are those words that people type into a search engine when they are looking on the internet for information. If you are interested in selling a product or service, it is your job to target the words or phrases that the customer is likely to use. Since most web pages are found by people using a search engine, this becomes a major source of traffic.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or Webpage Optimization are just fancy words for the process of getting your web page ranked how in the search (page rank). Think about it — when you do a search. how many times do you go past the top ten listed on page one? Well, maybe you occasionally go to page two to look at the second list of ten. But it is highly unusual that people go past there. They certainly don’t go to page 100 or page 1,000.
Your task at hand is tackle the job of finding a topic to get your website ranked in the top ten. You begin the process of targeting these topics with Keyword Research.
To do an effective job at any kind of research, you must have the proper tools. If you talk to 10 different marketers and ask what they use to do keyword research, you will undoubtedly get at least 5 or 6 different answers. It is not uncommon for someone to have a favorite Keyword Suggestion Tool and for it to change within a month or two. At the present time, one of the most popular free ones is seobook.
Nichebot is a paid service that costs around $14 a month. It is a tool you should consider after you become more experienced and are doing more keyword research. A larger list of tools will be presented to you in the Advanced Keyword Research section. That is for another time.
This type of research also helps you gauge the demand for a product. If there is not a market for a product, your job would be to create that market. This is not an easy job especially for a beginner. I do not mean to imply that you have to stick to the extremely popular subjects (weight loss, stop smoking, etc.) where the competition is stiff. However, you do need to decide if there is going to be a large enough market to make money from your hard work.