subject: Free Keyword Research - How To Target Traffic On The Cheap [print this page] Whatever technique you are using to get traffic to your site be it SEO or article marketing or social networking or PPC or anything else contextual, you know how important keyword research is in getting visitors to your site don't you? There are a bunch of products that can automate this task but you're on a tight budget and you want to get free keyword research to optimize your efforts.
Well free is a relative term. There are free tools but it means you have to put the time into using them and your time really has a cost. But when you're first starting out it makes sense to use the free keyword tools just so you understand how the process works. It will help you evaluate the pay for products when you finally decide to go in that direction.
Over 80% of all traffic starts as a search which means you want to do whatever you can to be on the first page of that search engine, preferably above the fold because that's as far down as 70% of the visitors go. Getting to that position is not only about using the correct keyword optimization but it is an important starting point.
So how do you rank on page 1? It starts with an idea for content. That content can be for the website or an article but this is the stuff that you want to rank for. Decide on a broad keyword for the article and then run it through one or two of the free tools to get keyword phrase ideas.
So where are these free keyword research tools? There are two that are very popular, Google's External Keyword Tool and the free version of WordTracker. The two big differences between these tools is that Google will undoubtedly have more keywords listed but they will not have that great a list of long tail keywords. The second difference is Google will express the number of searches monthly while WordTracker shows daily.
So let's say you have a site that promotes dog supplies. You might consider a piece of content on dog training because you have a number of products that fit into that category. Go to Google External Keyword and enter the general term dog training.
You'll notice you get a long list of keywords and that dog training gets over 1.5 million searches each month. If you then open another browser and Google dog training you'll see there are over 45 million results. Two things are important here. First broad keywords are not buying keywords, they are used by people looking for free information. Secondly, this keyword just has way too much competition with 45 million returns.
If you scroll down a little further you'll find electric dog training collar wit a little over 5,000 monthly searches. Do a Google search on that term and you'll get 45,000 returns. Now we're talking. The longer tail keyword is looking for a specific need to be filled, one that might be filled by your products. This is a better buying keyword.
Now if you did that same drill on WordTracker you would likely find even longer tailed keywords. The search volume won't be as much but the keywords are buying keywords.
The last thing to check is the competition for the keyword. Some people will tell you to place the keyword in quotes and find the results of pages that have that exact keyword phrase. You can do that if you like but how many people do you know that search that way? None right?
What's important is to see who is on the first page and if you have a chance to bump them. Firefox has a free SEO plugin that will show you the page rank and much more for each return.
If the first page is dominated by .gov, .edu or Wikipedia returns, you probably will not stand a chance because those will be considered authority sites. If however, you see articles from article directories or sites with a PR of 2 or less, give it a shot.
Yes all this is time consuming but that's the cost of free keyword research.
