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!

We consider picking keywords to be sort of an art form. There is a great deal of skill involved, while at the same time some room to be creative.

In any event, picking the right keywords is among the most critical tasks to a successful marketing campaign. If you pick the right keywords you are well on your way to success, but if you pick the wrong keywords you are going to be on an up-hill battle.

Hopefully you are thinking – how do I select the BEST keywords for my business?

The first step to picking keywords is to develop a HUGE list of potential keywords/keyphrases that your target might be searching for.

Write down as many keywords you can think of both generic and specific. Lets take an example – you sell toys online.

You should have written down:

Toys
Buy Toys
Toys for Sale
Childrens Toys

to name a few. Once you have your list, check out some of your competitors by doing searches for them online using the keywords you just wrote. Go to Google.com and type in Toys. You will get MILLIONS of results. Want to find out what keywords your competitors are going after? Simply click on view and then source in internet explorer (or firefox) and look towards the top for keywords.

Add these keywords to your list to make one HUGE list!

Enough for today, we don’t want to overload you with information! Stay tuned for our next post on how to take your master list and turn it into a small, well refined list posed for success!