How to Choose Keywords for SEO - Money Making Keywords


Selecting the best keywords for your website's Search Engine Optimization campaign is the first and foremost task. If you choose incorrect keywords, then every other activity like on-page optimization and link building, in your SEO plan will go just down the drain.

Identifying the keywords and key phrases that people use to search for information on the internet is of vital importance. All your SEO efforts should be focused on the keywords that are relevant as well as most searched. A site which has been optimized according to the relevant keywords will get the right traffic. In contrast, a site that has used keywords that do not represents site's theme or content may get visitors but that won't be of much help as those visitors will not find anything worthwhile on the site and will go back empty handed.

Choosing the best keywords starts with brainstorming using a mix of sources. First step is correctly identifying your site's main services/products, target audience and geographical location. After this an in-depth analysis of competitors, especially the top rankings ones, in your niche needs to be conducted. At this step you should be able to compile a list of broad keywords/phrases which will act as seed list. Once this has been done, you can use any of the popular keywords research tools to determine the popularity of the selected phrases as well find out other related keywords that may be used. These tools allow you to narrow down the phrases most suitable for your site. The tools also give an indication on the number of people who search for these keywords daily or over a period of time. One mistake that many SEO consultants make is that they choose the most popular keywords. Though, it's very obvious to go after the most popular keywords as those will bring the most traffic, one important piece of information that they forgot to factor in is the competition. More popular the keyword is, more will be the number of competing sites and lesser your chances of success in short to medium term. Instead, SEO consultants should also focus on keywords which may not be that much popular but not that competitive so that your site stands better chance of getting relevant traffic.
 Once, you have selected the keywords for your site, optimize your site accordingly and track your success. Monitor your ranking and traffic reports constantly. Since, keyword research is an iterative process you may try different keywords to see which keywords bring you more traffic. Measuring the success can be an easy job using web analytics tools like the one provided by Google.

The process of researching keywords and then measuring whether those optimization efforts produce the desired results using analytics is ongoing and should be managed like any other marketing effort with benchmarks and performance reports.

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