Find your primary keywords
I have stated the importance of keyword research in many of my articles which are included in the “All in one Keyword Research” section and hopefully by now you have realised that I am not joking, keyword research is a necessity if you want to dominate the search engines.
So now you know what keyword research is, what free and paid keyword research tools are available and why it is worth paying for these tools it is now time to show you how to perform keyword research to maximise your traffic and dominate those search engines.
Keyword research should be performed before any other task has begun this includes the development of the website, eBook, article or video. Keyword research is the next step after finding a market that you want to enter, to ensure the market is popular and your product, service or information is in demand.
To get started you will need some overall primary keywords these will be the defining keywords of your particular market such as “Internet Marketing” for articles, eBooks, videos, services or anything else you would offer on your website or “SEO” for SEO tools, guides, reviews, tips and tutorials. Primary keywords are also recognised to be seed keywords basically they are the words which start of your keyword research.
You can brainstorm your market idea and from there you will create a list of seed keywords however you will need more than just to brainstorm, read articles in the particular area find websites in your market scan the site to see what keywords stand out, how they stand out and write them down. It is good to use a notepad to list your primary keywords, if your out and about and suddenly think of a keyword or an idea for an angle to target the market then you will need to write it down, if you have not got a notepad try writing them in a text message and saving it (done that many times).
After you have done this you should end up with a list of about 15-30 primary keywords which you can then use for the next step of keyword research.
Put the tools to test
Now is the time to put those tools that I reviewed in the previous articles to test, whether you have bit the bullet and bought that all important keyword research tool or you plan to try and use just the free keyword tools to dominate your market we now need to use these keyword tools to find related keywords.
The idea here is that you use your primary/seed keywords that you brainstormed and found in part 1 of this tutorial and use these to find related keywords in the keyword research tools. Get prepared to be saving or copy and pasting loads of keywords in to a word document, or if you have a subscription to a keyword tool more than likely the tool will save them to your account. After you start creating a list of keywords you need to order them in priority, which you believe will be most relevant and most important to your website whilst being the most beneficial. This may be the stage where the idea you had in mind for your site, and the articles, tutorials videos you thought you would be writing will change and become different articles, tutorials and videos ones that will give your site a better chance of ranking for more popular keywords.
This brings me on swiftly to my next step in the how to perform keyword research tutorial.
Plan your website’s content
In this stage it is important that you plan your sites structure what categories you are going to have on your site and areas of the market you’re going to target by doing this you can organise your keywords in to particular categories which coordinate with the content you plan on writing, this way its all organised and you can easily optimise your articles when writing them. This is something I only started doing after a couple of months in to my website and I found myself returning to older articles to implement more keywords so that they were fully optimised. You can save time and increase your web pages strength by having the keywords ready before you start writing your content and before you create your website.
Get the most out of those keyword tools
Now it is time to return to those keyword research tools so by now you have your 15-30 primary/seed keywords, you also have your related keywords which have been put in to categories to coordinate with your websites content plan. It is time to try and target those long tail keywords and discover those hidden gems which have high daily searches but low competition. This is where free keyword tools become slightly out of depth, as the extra features you receive with tools such as wordtracker become more valuable.
Long tail keywords are keywords which contain 3 or more words in the phrase the ideal long tail keyword has little competition and high daily searches on search engines. The best way to find long tail keywords are through the keyword research terms, use your related keywords to effectively analyse every area of the market. You can also create long tail keywords yourself, by thinking what a user may type in to the search engines to find something in specific.
These are some examples of long tailed keywords
“Quality backlinks for my website at a cheap price”
“How to write an eBook with 30 pages or more”
“How to” are always good long tailed keywords to look out for, try searching some “how to” long tail keywords in your market and see what you find.
After you have found at least 10 long tail keywords with high traffic and low competition it is now time to plan in specific the content you are going to write on your website. You need to plan out your content so that you can easily incorporate your keywords both long tail and related keywords. Quality content written for humans is the best content you can find however you need to ensure that you include your keywords using the on page SEO techniques as well as adding the keywords to your content.
After you have written your content and created your website using your keywords for everything, from the domain name, to the title tags the meta tags the tags on your article the anchor text throughout the article its self the article categories and every where else that you should include your keywords.
It is time to do more keyword research, although keyword research should be the initial step after thinking of a market idea it is an ongoing technique which should be used throughout the life span of your website. When ever you go to write a new article research the keywords for the article, this is the same with anything else you may add to your site.
