Keyword research is the fundamental basis on which you should build your niche website, particularly one which you aim to monetize by Google adsense or the Amazon affiliate program.
But the skill of good keyword choices through research with the Google Adwords tool or similar tools is a skill that will stand you in really good stead for the building of any website.
You will spend quite a bit of time writing content and promoting your site in order to rank well in the search engines and attracting visitors for free traffic which is a cornerstone of building a great website which attracts great volumes of traffic to whatever your business offers.
So, lets take an example of how you would carry out your keyword research and keep in the forefront of your mind what you are trying to achieve.
You are looking for a keyword or more accurately a key phrase which will in the first instance form the basis of your site. So lets say you are going to create a site about pens.
Pens on it’s own is a huge market and the word “pens” will be too difficult to rank for initially.
So I would give it a miss and dig deeper down into this market and go for a more niche market such as “fountain pens”. To research how competitive a phrase this is I will firstly go to the free keyword tool and type in the phrase “fountain pens”. I make sure to choose All Locations in the settings you are offered and also to choose “exact” searches in the left panel.
This tells me that today there are 8100 exact searches per month for this keyphrase. I then go to the Google search engine and type in “fountain pens” and this is important-you must put the key phrase in inverted commas because this gives us more accurate results.
I know that people do not search like this but we are trying to establish how many sites are optimized for this key phrase and the inverted commas allows us to see this. When I do this I get a results figure of 687,000 which is far too competitive.
So I will not build a site targetting “fountain pens” because the search results figure I am looking for above must be less than 50,000.
So I go back to the keyword tool and carry out this type of research on other key phrases. When I have a look again I take a look at “pelikan fountain pen”. This exact phrase is searched for 1,600 times per month and the number of sites which are optimized for this phrase is 65,200, that is to say that when I put “pelikan fountain pen” into Google’s search box the number of results returned is 65,200.
Even though this is borderline insofar as it is greater than the 50,000 I normally use as a cut off I will go for it on this occasion.
I did in fact proceed to purchase a domain name targetting this key phrase and within weeks this site was on the first page of Google and has remained there since.
This method of keyword research is designed to let you see key phrases that are not too competitive and have decent search numbers. As you get more proficient you will be able to show more ambition in your targeted key phrases but it is important when you start out that you see some little victories and gain some momentum.
This keyword research is critical important when building a website for any purpose because it saves you a lot of time and frustration trying to rank for search terms/keywords that are simply too competitive.
This method of choosing phrases to target for your site can be used for any site in any market and will ensure that you get the best return on your efforts to attract the maximum search engine traffic to your site.
And this traffic is of course “free” traffic and will grow exponentially over time as you add new content to your site and the search engine robots add more and more combinations of your keywords to it’s search results.
The alternative to carrying out smart keyword research is to write about topics and keyphrases randomly and to hope for the best..this is not a strategy designed to bring long term success.
This is step 2 in this series of starting an online business-check out step 1, an overview of starting an on line business.
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