Monday, November 5, 2007

Keyword Research -- a Secret Trick Most People Don't Know

If you're interested in doing keyword research before entering into a niche or market, then you will want to read this article. Specifically, we will discuss how to do keyword research for free, and the proper way to assure you get the most accurate data so you know which keywords to optimize for. After reading this article, you should have a strategy you can use to start all your keyword research.

If you're going to enter into any niche, you should start broad, then go narrow. This ensures you won't miss important keywords. For example, let's say you were going to do keyword research for dieting tips. To start broad, we'd want to research a term like diet. We are not looking for just keywords with diet in them however, because search engines like Google also analyze relevancy by latent semantic indexing (LSI). What LSI means is that search engines check for similar terms related to diet to determine how relevant the content website is.

To take advantage of LSI properly, do a Google search for diet, but put a tilde (~) in front of the term, so search would look like this: ~diet. Google will return related words in bold such as weight loss, recipes, wheat, meal, eating and foods. Notice the difference from these words and words you'd find in a thesaurus. If you're doing keyword research properly, your best to use terms that search engines tell you are relevant, and not what a thesaurus suggests.

You can then take each of these terms, and do another tilde search, and write down more related words that pop up. By going through broader words into more specific words, you'll be sure not to miss any words related to your keyword, and also have a list of an exact vocabulary to use in your pages to ensure Google will evaluate your content as being highly relevant.

In conclusion, the strategy I have given you something you should use every time you're going to do keyword research for a new niche. While this is not the only strategy you should employ, it is the best one to use for getting a list of terms to look at and consider as traffic sources. The next logical step would be to determine how many users are searching for each of those terms, and then locating ones with high searches so you can optimize for not just the keyword, but related keywords that the search engines also place value upon.

No comments: