This little tips of mine may help some newbies to SEO in DP forum. Let me throw some SEO words first here to cover overall SEOs for your site. PageRank, Link Exchange, Meta tags, Domain name, Unique contents, Keywords, Keyword density, etc. I am sure you know these already or you must have heard them at least, right? Now the single most important thing among all these is keywords. Simply, if you can pick good keywords, you do well in the rest of SEO techniques. Everything else really depends on what kind of keywords you choose. Keyword in domain name Keyword in meta tags Keyword in page content Keyword - keyword density Keyword - anchor text - link exchange - PageRank It's all about keywords, isn't it? This is nothing new and this is too basic. But have you really thought a lot about how important this is? I once thought I was careful enough to pick good keywords all the time. But later on, I found I was wrong, realizing there were more competitors than I expected or found out some sites were SEOing heavily for a long time. We all know that a keyword should not be too general. You must find a good niche keyword, otherwise no matter what you do, it will be very difficult to compete with already established sites with your keywords. Your Homework: 1. Find out how many competitors are out there with your GENERAL keyword. This doesn't mean you type your keywords and search to see how many web pages are indexed in Google. Notice that not all indexed pages are optimized for SE's, meaning that some webmasters happened to have web pages with your keywords without any SEO. Competitors are the ones who know SEO and promoting theirs sites with your keywords. Look carefully their sites and check page source to see how they SEO. Do they use meta tags, good keyword density? Don't assume high PR pages are optimized well. Sometimes they are not that optimized! 2. Find out more NICHE keyword based on your GENERAL keyword. There are good tools out there already. I recommend keyword suggestion tools like Good Keywords by Softnik Technologies. Finding a good niche keyword is tricky. You would like to avoid a heavy competition with others but grab well searched keywords by people. If you know a lot about SEO and confident, then you can go for a popular niche keyword. Otherwise, take a smaller step and secure some niche keywords for yourself. Remeber always to check and get a rough idea on how many competitors exist. Sometimes, seemingly general keywords are not that promoted. 3. If you can't get in top 30 at Google, drop the keyword. Know who you are competing with. Even though you find there aren't many competitors with your keywords, some of them may be way ahead of you in terms of SEO. If they (say, 30 sites) are already heavily promoting, you may not get in top 30 at Google SERP. So, less competition doesn't mean you can always succeed with your SEO. If they seem to know a lot about SEO, drop the keyword. I don't know about you, and it certainly depends on the keyword, but I like to get in top 30 whatever the keyword I want to promote. If I don't see the chance, I don't bother. Get in top 30 at least! Good luck on hunting your keywords!
Just for fun here are some ways of gauging competitiveness of terms you are targeting Term -- ‘Blue Widgets’ Core search; 1 200 000 results http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-21,GGLG:en&q=blue+widgets Quotation narrowing; 50 300 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=%22blue+widgets%22 Allintitle – 606 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=allintitle%3Ablue+widgets allinurl – 86 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=allinurl%3Ablue+widgets Term 2 – ‘Red Widgets’ Core search – 1 390 000 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=red+widgets quotation modifier – 20 600 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=%22red+widgets%22 allintitle – 141 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=allintitle%3Ared+widgets allinurl – 38 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-21%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=allinurl%3Ared+widgets As you can start to see some terms react differently when tightening up the process …. And as mentioned, some manual inspection is eventually required on the top results…. Well..that was it.. just felt like adding onto things…
I guess you saved my time. Thanks for sharing it, David. Doing the reasearch with Allintitle at Google is one way to narrow down to find out your competitors. But just because they use your keyword in meta tag title it doesn't mean they are SEOing with the keyword. But this is probably the best way to narrow down quickly. Always check the page source and see how the page is optimized. Often many webmasters would insert decent meta tags without any knowledge of SEO. That's just way too basic.
Just perfect! This proves i was not wrong when i choosed two domain names that were free in portuguese language... doing this tests the results are amazing! They´re two of the most high paid words/phrases and the results are: Results 1 - 5 of 5 for allintitle: Results 1 - 1 of 1 for allinurl and Results 1 - 10 of about 100 for allintitle: Results 1 - 10 of about 16 for allinurl: My two sites aren´t indexed yet, so... think i hit a jackpot. Gotta work this really well! The competition for this two havent started yet because they´re quite new activities in portugal and all the competition i see is in Adwords. Let´s see if i can make something really clever out of this! Thanks for this great post! Just made my day (late night)...!
Glad U R having fun with it... I wrote some more recently on Keyword Targeting strategies May also be of use
I also check my competitors link popularity in determining how many of them are out there. Check top 20 sites with your keyword for their link popularity. If too high (1000 +), you may not want to compete with them. Check their PageRank. If top 20 are all PR4 or higher, you may want to drop that keyword, especially domains are 1 + year old. Number of backlinks pretty much show how much a webmaster knows SEO to get ranked high. If he has already achieved 1000 + links, not much chance. Addition to the quantity, the quality of backlinks are important also as you know. Find out how many high PR backlinks your competitors got if you can.