Choosing Keywords

Logic tells me that it is best to go for keywords that get a smaller amount of traffic each month, but have little or no competition.

Is this totally correct? One of the keyword phrases I found gets an average of 50,000 searches each month with no advertiser competition at all. I have put the phrase into my title text, keyword selection, page description, added it as the H1 title and included it atleast 4 times throughout a 500 word article, with 1 occurance being set as an anchor text link to a related product, but I'm not getting any result on the search engines.

My site is new and has very low PR. Could this be the reason for the search engines not liking it, and do I just have to be patient and wait for my PR to go up??

 

While choosing keywords, I pay attention to the following

1. Low competition
2. High search volume
3. Less Yahoo search results

 

When I do keyword research I always consider this one: High number of average searches but low number of search result

 

thanks for info..
can u explain little more pls...

 

Yes, use Low competition and those keywords or key phrases which have good search volume

There are so many online tool through which you can easily check out online potential of any keyword.

 

I think keywords is important in page ranking to attract new traffic...but erm...why not focus on content to attract repeated traffic

 

thanks for the advice...

 

what do u mean by 'no advertiser competition at all'?

are u referring to the one provided by google adwords tool?

if yes, then it is not correct to determine the competition of your keywords.

the right one is to type those keyword in "keyword" format in any search engine and see the results.

then u will now how many website available with those keyword that u targeting for.

for advance user, they will use 'allintitle' check in google but this is optional.

 

Thanks Remy_101. Yes I was determining the competition from the Google keyword tool. However, what you have pointed out makes total sense and will now be part of my keyword process.

 

I find that for search results in Google, you really want to obtain keywords that don't return any more than 800,000 results, otherwise it gets very hard to rank well there. This almost always precludes short keywords - you want more specific long-tail keywords anyway.

 

Yes, it is somewhat true that you must choose a keyword that has low competitors or none.

 

Low competition or none has higher chances to get sales.If customers type your keyword in search engine ,they will see your page immediately and it will get more exposure which turns into traffic.Traffics can increase as you work in time.

 

Something with 50k searches a month will have competition as remy said.

It is best in my opinion to target the lower competition keywords with as many searches/month as possible.

For certain niches you can go for keywords with only a few hundred searches as long as you think you can get into the top 5 results you will get enough traffic to be able to make money.

Unless you are planning on making a long term consistent effort site do not go for a niche too broad or has lots of big names dominating.

 

Targeting niche segments of your industry is what's required. So, focus on those long-tail keywords with low searches but high relevance to your site objective.

"Online Marketing" is broad with high search and high competition, " online marketing plans for startups" would have low search volumes but you'll have less competition ( because of lack of creative keyword researcher),and, highly targeted traffic.

 

double check keyword tool that tell you 50,000 searches.

 

If you are doing the seo on your site then it will take a while for you to see any results on google. Your best bet is to create articles and web 2.0 properties and link that content to your website.

For finding good keywords you need to make sure that:

-> They have good search volume
-> Relevant to your product/service
-> Low competition (ie in "exact match" competiting pages")
-> Are commercially viable

If there are no paid advertisements for 50,000 searches a month I would be very weary. It sounds like the keyword is not profitable at all.

I have a free report and video on keyword research I did in a different niche (you can find link in my sig). Even though it may not be relevant to your niche it should give you a better idea of how to do keyword research.

 

Thanks very much to everyone who has contributed to thread. Some really helpful advice and very good points. There's so many things to consider, but the challenge to get results is kind of addictive!

 

This may be of interest and it might not!

But the keyword phrase I was originally talking about in this page is showing that last month it actually recieved 110,000 searches (Google keyword tool). I ran the search and there were 13.3 million results and obviously my 10 day old no PR site didn't show anywhere. I did an exact match search for the same phrase and my site came in 10th out of 1559 results.

My conclusion; I've written and SEO'd the page well enough, but choosen the wrong keyword i.e. too much competition on the usual non-exact match search.

 

Branch your content out onto web 2.0 properties, blogs and article sites. You will stand a much better chance of getting them to rank well!

 

Its best if you go after keywords with low title competition. You can find that out if you google this: "keyword".

The lower the better. It is always best to go after a keyword with many searches. Nevertheless, if you find a recurring search patter for a keyword that indicates the person searching might be a buyer you shouldnt let it go even if the number of searches is lower. Highly specific targeted traffic will result in a higher conversion ratio.