SEO - Beginner's Guide to Keyword Research for SEO

All good SEO starts with good keyword research. Whether you are focusing on on-page or off-page SEO, you have to know which keywords you are targeting if you want to experience any degree of success. Here's a quick guide for beginners to effective keyword research.

Buying Keywords

If you are selling products or services, it is a good idea to focus your efforts on 'buying' keywords. Keywords which incorporate 'cheap', 'offer', 'best' and other similar permutations generally mean that the searcher is looking for something to buy, making them exactly the sort of person who you want to land on your website.

This doesn't mean you should not focus on other keywords. Information keywords are also worth targeting because people will often search for information on a subject before they decide to buy. However, knowing the distinction and choosing your keywords accordingly will help you to focus your efforts more effectively.

Longtail Keywords

Longtail keywords consist of two or more words, and sometimes many more. There are fewer searches made on these than less-specific keywords, but there are some good reasons to target them in your SEO campaigns.

Longtail keywords are generally used by people who are further along the sales process. These searchers have done their general searches and have not found what they are looking for. Now they know exactly what they are looking for and they have made their search more specific as a result.

Longtail keywords are also easier to rank for because there is normally less competition. This means that you can actually bring in a large number of very high-quality leads through targeting numerous longtail keywords instead of struggling to get to the top of the rankings by targeting less-specific keywords.

Factors when Determining a Good Keyword

Before you start to target a particular keyword, you will want to find out how easy or difficult it will be to rank for. You can start by using a free tool such as the Google AdWords Tool which will tell you the amount of searches that are made on the keyword, but after this you will want to find out exactly how competitive the keyword is.

There are a number of such tools that you can use, both free and bought. These will provide you with important information on the first 10 websites which show up in a search result (the only ones which matter for SEO purposes), including:

The number of backlinks to the page
The number of backlinks to the domain
The PageRanks
The on-site optimisation for the URL, title, description and header tags

All of this information will provide you with what you need to know to determine how easy it will be to rank for a particular keyword. Alternatively, hire an SEO professional to help analyse these keywords to help you decide which ones to focus on.

Spend Time on Keyword Research

Keyword research is crucial for the success of any SEO campaign. However, it can sometimes be a difficult area to get right, and many people hire an SEO expert at this stage to ensure they are starting off on the right track.

Whether you go it alone or use the help of an expert, make sure that you take keyword research very seriously because if not you can end up wasting a lot of time and effort.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Marcus_J_Miller

Source: Ezine

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