How to Find Keywords for Articles and Websites

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Time

Step 1

We often hear about keyword research, used for articles, websites, or even PPC campaigns. How to find the right ones and how to do a basic search sometimes can be mind boggling. I know when I first started out, someone suggested I gather keywords for my niche market.
It became a difficult task. I had no idea where to start. Here's what I learned.
First, you need have an idea of what your site or article is about. Let's use "mattress". I wrote an ebook about how to purchase a luxury mattress for less than retail. My first attempt was to use the word "mattress" in my site and my pay-per-click campaign. Using a free keyword tool is ideal for finding how many people search for this term and what to do with it once you have it.
Try http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
or try http://www.google.com/adwords/
Type in your initial topic word.
I used "mattress".
Step 2

This will yield over 100 of the top keywords with the term "mattress" in it. These words were searched over the last month. At the time of writing, its been searched over 10,000 times. Pretty good.
Once you have a list of 100 top keywords, you can start to build your list. By expanding your list, you can see how many others you can come up with. Google now recommends PPC campaigns through Adwords have a keyword list of 20 for best results. I like to start a little higher and optimize my campaign. Once you have an initial list of keywords, use Google's Adwords Keyword tool, this allows you to see not only how many searches are occurring on Google, but also what the going PPC rate for each one is. The reason you do this, the more advertisers, the higher the cost. This can limit your keyword list for SEO on your site, but not in your articles.

Go to Google and by typing in your first 10 keywords you can see exactly how many sites are associated with your keyword.
At this time, "mattress" had over 19,900,000 website associated with it. This is a huge number to work with for SEO. If you want Google or any of the other search engines to find you, keep moving down your keyword list. The smaller the number of associated websites, the faster up the page rank you can go.
For article writing, I like to use the top keywords, "mattress", "mattresses", or "mattress discounters". If you're using it for PPC, picking less searched items may help you be more successful. I moved down the list, coming across "how to purchase a mattress" yielded 3,190,000 websites. Keep going down your list, once you find a manageable number of websites. "Best Mattress" only yielded 774,000 websites and the number one search was only a PR of 4.

With some on-page SEO and effective link building, you can easily move your site up in Alexa rating. I recently made a 75% improvement in my sites Alexa rating by using these techniques.
Step 3

This is an easy way to use your keywords in your articles. Keeping your articles between 500-1500 words you can easily write a few sentences about your selected keywords. The idea in article writing is not to overload your keywords. For instance, if I say we are talking about mattresses and I use the word mattress 50 times in an article with only 500 words, that's an average of one keyword every 10 words. Your article will be boring and your readers will want to run from you.

Also, don't forget you can write several articles using different keywords that interchange. Writing five articles using mattress, bed, futon, etc. can increase your article visibility and promote your site in general.

Using keywords for PPC campaigns is a bit tricky for some. By choosing twenty to sixty long tail keywords you can easily optimize your campaign and eliminating the keywords not offering the ads to consumers. For PPC campaigns, the longer more specific the keywords, the better and more specific your ads will be served. If you don't know how to run an effective PPC campaign, you can enroll in a course or even hire a PPC manager.

The best list of keywords are the ones that draw the largest viewers. Don't focus on over using them. Try to cut the keywords which don't suit your product or website.

Using your keywords in the Title of your website, in the main headline and sprinkling them through out your page will help your SEO, but don't think your page rank will soar from onpage SEO. Focusing on off-page SEO is the key to higher page ranks.

The next step to creating your keyword list is using a spreadsheet program to collect them. This will allow you to rotate keywords in your site pages and in your PPC campaign. If one keyword is eliminated, you can easily add a new one in its place.

In finding niches, a keyword research tool can be very effective as well. Knowing what people are searching for could help you create a traffic drawing article or even a sell able ebook. Try using the keyword tool by searching for "how to", "learn to" or "learn". These searches will yield a list of what is being searched for in the way of learning materials. I have used this several times. Writing articles about "how to know your mattress needs to be replaced" or "how to buy a mattress". By getting creative with these free tools, you can determine where to spend time researching your new material.

Comments

bekj said

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on 6/25/2009 I'll be further explaining some aspects of articles, keywords and SEO in a new series of articles. Also I'll have a video series as well. Thanks so much for the wonderful feedback. Hope to help everyone learn about this.

Bek