It’s a gorgeous day here in Niagara, Falls, NY. I hope it’s very nice in your hometown today as well!
Our last post was all about how to establish a large list of potential keywords to optimize your web site with.
Today will be talking about refining that list to narrow in on the 10-15 keywords you will actively target throughout your web site.
You’ve got this huge list of keywords, some generic and broad, others very specific and narrow. The key is to find some that are just in the middle. These keywords have two traits in common – good traffic (amount of searches being done daily) and limited competition.
Let’s take an example to better illustrate this. You sell a weight loss product and are trying to get ranked in the top of Google and yahoo but you are unsure which keywords to target. Your huge list has broad keywords like: weight loss and specific keywords like weight loss now and fast.
Put all of these keywords into a program or web site like good keywords, wordtracker or Google keywords to check two things – search traffic and number of competitors – look for ones in the middle.
We can see that weight loss is getting the most searches per day – in Google alone there are about 2300 searches being done everyday! That’s a TON of traffic – BUT there are over 36 million web sites competing for that keyword. That is WAY to many, it would take you years and most likely hundreds of thousands of dollars to get in the top ten. After spending some time looking over all your keywords you start to notice the better ones – weight loss pills is getting 400 searches a day but only has a million web sites competing for it, quick weight loss is getting 350 searches a day and has less than 700,000 web sites going after it.
Picking keywords takes practice. The biggest take away from this lesson is – do not target keywords that are getting the most search traffic go for ones that are getting good search traffic that has fewer competitors you are much more likely to get ranked in the search engines quicker.
Enjoy your day!
