I'd like to share with you here and incredible article written by Maurie Fay - one of the team here at Chris Farrell Membership. One of Maurie's particular skills is explaining KEYWORDS. I have often said that keywords are the backbone of Internet Marketing. Here then - is a detailed examination of how you can harness the power of keywords - and benefit quickly from the targeted traffic they can generate for you. Why are Keywords important? That might seem an obvious question, but keywords really are the lifeblood of the internet marketer, and the link between a prospective list member and/or buyer of your product. They are the method by which your website or blog, or article is found. The keyword or keywords are the words or phrases that the person searching for information, types into the search engine Skill Number One! Think like the person who is looking for the information or service or product you have to sell. Try to imagine just what words, (and more importantly) phrases they might enter into a search engine to eventually find your web page or article listed in the first few results. That really is the final goal: to have our page or article appear not only on the first page of Google, but if possible in the top three results. Using Google's full potential OK, before we launch in to the process, we should review some search techniques that are available on Google. This will help in our own searches and also help us find more targeted keywords. I apologize if this is basic at this stage, but we will get to the good stuff a little down the track. Firstly lets do a search on Google for Internet Marketing: These are the results. Notice we have returned 150,000,000 results. What we see here are all the web pages which contain the words internet, or marketing or the phrase internet marketing. Let's now surround the words in quotation marks. What we re asking Google to do now is to show only those pages which contain the phrase "internet marketing" in precisely that order. Now we have 41,000,000 results. Still a lot, but we have weeded out any page which contained internet without the word marketing appearing alongside. Note the returned pages can still contain internet or marketing , but somewhere else on the page they do contain the phrase internet marketing. So far so good…..next, let's ask Google to search for pages which contain the phrase internet marketing and the words Chris Farrell. Notice we added the plus sign. This will give us all the pages which contain internet marketing as a phrase and also contain the words Chris or Farrell I'm sure you know what is coming next...! Lets surround Chris Farrell in quotes to give us all the pages which contain internet marketing as a phrase and Chris Farrell as a phrase... Wow! We are starting to hone in and narrow down our criteria. Are you with me so far?...... In the same way we can use the "minus' sign to show pages which exclude the term we want. A search for pages which show internet marketing as a phrase but which don't contain Chris Farrell as a phrase shows us the following: I'm sure by now you get the technique. Actually, we're still a fair way away from some really meaty keyword research, but these Google "bits and pieces" can make your searches "sing" Tell me if I'm boring You... (note from Chris - NO YOU ARE NOT MAURIE!!!) By now we have the basic understanding of how to hone in on our Google searches. Next: The tools we will use to find our keywords We will be looking for "Long Tail Keywords." These are keyword phrases consisting of two or more words, which we think the searcher will enter into the search engine. As most of us are probably looking to use article writing to drive traffic to our sites, I tend to use the keyword strategy to suggest long tail keywords I can use as article titles. If they are in some way related to my niche, I can usually construct an angle in the article to connect them to my website topic or product, while still providing relevant content in the article. Further, if we identify a keyword that is of interest, it's a distinct possibility we can use it to find a related affiliate product to market, and it can be the start of a whole new project. Rinse and Repeat!! As far as your web page or blog is concerned, if you are using article marketing and other techniques to gain traffic, don't stress too much over keywords you add to your html tags. Rely on well written content on the site to be eventually indexed and picked up by the search engine crawlers. On the other hand, if you rely on SEO to get traffic, then you will have to place much more attention to what keywords you have on your site. SEO is a never ending process, and my personal opinion is that article writing and other techniques build more lasting nd enduring link back to your site. I'm sure you have heard a lot about competition for keywords. Sure it's an issue to be overcome, but that's exactly why you need to do good keyword research. It goes without saying that unless people can find the information you supplying (your web page or blog, or your article) then its just not going to happen. I'll try to find a keyword in our subsequent sessions in probably one of the most competitive niches around, to show you that their just might be opportunities even in some really competitive niches. And that niche is INTERNET MARKETING! What is the process we will go through? * Select your niche. Easier said than done! However you will notice as we go through the example ( I hope) that there are niches within niches etc... so by doing our keyword research well we just might identify a sub nice, and decide to jot it down as a possibility , then dig deeper within it to find keywords we can use. * Build you "bulk" keyword list. * Identify search volumes for those keywords. * ]Identify search results i.e. competition for those keywords. * Filter and refine...come up with our shortlist. * Start writing. OK that is the process we will go through in subsequent posts. BEFORE we do that, in the next post we will look at the tools you need to do your keyword research. The Keyword Tools We Will Use I will try to suggest tools which are free to use. I do actually use a paid service for some things, but almost the same results are available with free tools, and all we might have to do is go through one extra step. It comes as no surprise that most of the tools are provided by Google. They want people to use their services, so there are enough Google bits and pieces we can use. I'll start by listing the Google tools and a short description about each. Obviously we are going to make extensive use of the regular Google search facility. Other Tools... # GOOGLE KEYWORDS TOOL. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal The Google keyword tool is really designed to help you find keywords to use in your advertising, but it suits us fine to generate relevant keyword lists. There are several options which you can change eg, phrase searching or broad searching. Note that there are also two basic ways to search for words...Descriptive Words or Phrases, or by Website content. Google's Keyword tool will be the main resource we will use in our search, and we will comeback to it later. # GOOGLE WONDER WHEEL This is a great keyword "digger". Use it to drill down from a keyword of interest to find Keyword phrases within keyword phrases. To access the wonder wheel tool click on Show Options in a regular Google search page, then select the wonder wheel option. I'll post some screenshots now, so you can see how it works, because we won't really use it in this search. It is another tool in our arsenal though, which lets you drill deeper and deeper into the niche, and see related keywords. You will note as I click on branch to go to the next level, the relevant search results are shown to the right. Very handy little tool, and you should try it. Keyword Research Tools cont... # GOOGLE INSIGHTS http://www.google.com/insights/search This product will help you decide if the phrase or keyword is maintaining, increasing or declining in its monthly search volume over time. Note: read the information on the site regarding the graph figures and values. You have several options in terms of time to show on the graph, it also shows regional search volume. I will let you go and explore that one later. And finally…..one other handy thing... # A BLANK SPREADSHEET Time now to get into it. I normally at some stage of the process use the descriptive word or phrase option, but to get started today I'm going to search for keyword ideas by looking at a website in Google's Keyword Tool. The keywords we will get are basically what Google thinks the website is about. I have chosen www.ChrisFarrellMembership.com out of interest, and because it is a large site, relevant to our niche, we should get plenty of suggestions. Here is what that result looks like: Your results may differ from mine in the "local" column, because mine will show Australian results, but in reality we are more interested in the Global search volume. Also I am writing this in August 2009 just a few months after Chris has launched his site -- and indications are that it is going to grow at a rapid rate! You can reorder the list by clicking on any of the column headings, and if you are interested in a keyword, move it your list by clicking "add" I wont attempt to show you the remainder of the list, its too long, and you are better off going to the site and doing it yourself. At this point, we have chosen the "broad" match criteria. We are looking for ideas. When you have selected a series of phrases, save them by adding to your list and then download them as a csv file for inclusion in your spreadsheet. So how do we choose what to add? Good question. There are no hard and fast rules. Try to pick terms which interest you, and those to which you might say "mmm...never thought of that" Chances are not many other people have either. I don't worry too much about search volume at this point, except to say that you should ignore results with search volume under 200 or so. This is where your imagination and creativity have to take over. Nevertheless add as many keywords as you like to your list. Now the hard work starts! Keep the keyword tool open and select interesting phrases from your saved list on the right. Type them or copy and paste them into the search box, this time using "descriptive words and Phrases" and the "exact match" option. We are drilling down to find more related keywords. Do the same this time add the ones you like the look of to your list. When you have gone as far as you like…..no rules… download your saved list to csv file and open it in your spreadsheet. I did that and built a list of related keywords (286) NOW...it is time consuming, but here is what I do. Firstly conditionally format the second column (the one which contains the advertiser competition) to change color depending on the value I enter there. This is where we will enter the search result numbers from Google. For this exercise, and mostly I agree with Chris's comments to not use a keyword phrase if there are more than 40,000 results, so I have formatted the column to be green if the results are less than 40,000, yellow between 40 and 50,000, red between 50 and 75,000. No color if more than 75,000. Those above 57,000 will eventually be deleted. When you are starting off, ideally try to keep the results not much over 5000. This is my personal preference, I stress do what works for you. The point is you re going to have lots of keywords, so you will have to evolve a way to handle them. I start at the bottom and for each phrase, I copy and paste into Google IN QUOTES, and enter the number of results into my spreadsheet. I have really only just stated the job, but you can see my progress. This is slow and laborious, I know, but has to be done. When I have it complete, I delete the results over 75,000, and save the file for later reference. In time, I will maybe write an article with the keyword in the title, or see if I can find an affiliate product to match in some way. Now, I have spotted something... See the "jobs for moms at home entry"? It returned only 1800 or so results, so now lets pop back to the Keyword tool, and see how many searches there are for that phrase. COOL…my keyword tool says 320. Just enough. I also happened to notice a couple of interesting other phrases which came up in the search, so later Ill head back and add them to my list. So now we have a long tail keyword, with not much competition, and in our niche!!! I'd probably plug it into Google insights to see the volume trends there are over time, and might also do a wonder wheel search to see what happens, but it looks the goods to me! I would put more effort into it if I did see a positive trend of course. Right now, I think this mission has been accomplished. We found a keyword worth some effort in a very competitive niche. Thanks for reading this post, I hope it has helped. Cheers, Maurie.