subject: A New Approach to Keywords For Building Your Online Business [print this page] A common misconception persists among aspiring internet marketers. Many still believe that the key to building a successful online business is to cast a wide net by targeting hundreds, or even thousands, of keywords. Use any of the "spying" tools out there to analyze your competitors' sites and you'll see for yourself.
In practice, this thought process can overwhelm a person and throw him or her into a tailspin of 'Analysis Paralysis', spending countless hours analyzing keywords looking for that golden ticket. As a result they never follow through with the actions required to create the profitable business they seek.
Those Were The Days
In the early days of Internet marketing, brute force methods like "keyword stuffing" were effective. You could succeed in getting good rankings and subsequent traffic by placing a large number of related keywords on a single page or included them in the pages Meta and Alt tags. This practice gave rise to the "black hat" tactic of hiding keyword text to trick the search engines without distracting visitors. The search engines adapted and this strategy is now obsolete.
Similarly, in the early days of Google AdWords, you could use a "shotgun" approach and load your account with as many as thousands of keywords and generate a steady volume of traffic to your site. The problem is that no site (outside of an encyclopedia) can be relevant to this many keywords.
This practice has brought about the infamous Google Slap. With the continual refinements in search engine algorithms and the addition of "subjective" quality metrics such as Google's Quality score, you can no longer just cast a wide net and hope for the best.
An Updated Approach
Given the new environment, the best alternative is a far more targeted, almost sniper-like approach in which you explore your market carefully and then zero your sights on a small set of more specific keywords.
Like diamonds in the rough, these keywords are just the essence of an asset that you will refine for your online business. In order to transform a keyword into a cash generating asset, you need to undertake a series of tasks. They are not arduous or complex tasks, but unfortunately most people never get around to doing them. The simple act of following through can separate you from 97% of the other internet marketers out there.
These tasks include on-page and off-page optimization, generating high quality backlinks to your website, content promotion via articles and video, and pursuing targeted pay-per-click campaigns.
Clearly, it would be impossible to follow through on these activities if you are trying to target thousands of keywords. So, rather than spending your time generating keyword lists a mile long, here is a more focused strategy that is also more likely to succeed in today's environment.
Your Assignment, Should You Choose To Accept It
Use any of a number of free or proprietary tools to generate a collection of keywords in your niche. Then start cutting and polishing - refine and filter these keywords until you identify 5-10 that have the following three characteristics:
(1) They are highly relevant to your niche;
(2) They have reasonable levels of traffic (at least 100 visitors per day, exact match);
(3) The competitive dynamics are sound - competition is relatively low (
Chip Wilson is an author, coach and entrepreneur. After graduating from the Harvard Business School in 1992 he had a successful 15 year career on Wall S
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