The Basics Of Keyword Research - It Isn't That Hard Afterall
The Basics Of Keyword Research - It Isn't That Hard Afterall
Keyword research can be an often overlooked but nonetheless crucial aspect of making sure your page will appear high enough in the search engines to warrant further effort on your part. If you choose a keyword that has too much competition or simply doesn't get enough searches to make it worth your time, it might be better to move on and find a different angle of entering whatever niche it is you are looking to enter.
There are tools out there such as Market Samurai that do a great job of giving you good insight into many different factors that you will need to consider as you are looking for good keywords. If the competing webmasters have optimized their website well and have acquired a good amount of backlinks, it will naturally take longer for your site to reach or surpass those websites in the search engine rankings.
Things to look out for in the competition are whether or not the title tag contains the keyword, whether the webpage URL has the keyword in it, if it is in the description (meta tag) of the site, and also if it is wrapped in the H1 through H6 tags somewhere on the page. If the keyword in question is in all four of those, then they have optimized the page pretty well for that keyword and it will be harder to compete against.
So this should tell you that when you do find a good keyword that has a good amount of search volume and isn't overly competitive, it would be in your best interest to make sure you optimize everyone one of your pages for the different keywords you will be going after. It will add that much more strength to your pages.
Probably the most important aspect of gauging your competition is how many incoming links they have pointing towards their specific URLs. Not all links are the same however, many carry a totally different weight in the search engines eyes. One site that only has 50 backlinks may rank higher for a keyword than a competing site that has for example 200 backlinks. If the first site has links pointing back to it that are from pages with more quality links pointing to them than the second site has, the first site will most likely outrank it.
Don't worry about the domain so much, it may show thousands of backlinks, but you are really only competing against single pages of that domain. A good example would be to take an Amazon page, and then find out how many incoming links it has pointing towards a specific page. I briefly glanced over the search results for a particular guitar amplifier, and it showed only 3 incoming links to that URL. That's nothing.
As of right now, SeoQuake is showing that it has 265,761,365 backlinks pointing towards the domain, but that isn't a big problem because you aren't competing with that domain. If you have some crazy idea of outranking Amazon with the keyword Amazon, you would be crazy. What you will be doing however, is competing with individual pages or URLs, which I might add aren't too hard to outrank.
Amazon doesn't do a great job of optimizing their pages for individual keywords, so you will have that advantage. I only bring up Amazon as an example to follow along with. You can tell fairly early on if a keyword is worth competing for, plus you only need a few tools. Some of these are free and some are paid. The Google Keywords Tool is a great free option to show you the searches per month, and a few other metrics like the average cost per click for the keywords you are researching. Plus you can get the results as broad, exact, and phrase match.
What the Google Keyword Tool doesn't do though, is show you how many backlinks a page has and how well optimized it is for the keyword. Market Samurai does this along with quite a few others, however it is not free. Some free alternatives would be Micro Niche Finder, SEMRush, or Traffic Travis.
You could also install a couple add-ons if you are running Firefox. SEOQuake as well as SEO for Firefox will both give you some great information about pages you find when searching. If you have done keyword research for awhile now, this will be nothing new, and I assume you probably are very familiar with all of this. However, if you are new it can be confusing, so I hope I have helped answer some of the basic questions involved in keyword research.
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