subject: Search Engine Optimization: A Killer Tip! [print this page] What is the first task before building your website?
Do you know that targeting your website for non-popular keywords is a deadly mistake? You will be number #1 on Google, but no one looks for this keyword. Hence, opting for the proper tools to check the popularity of your keyword is a must to make money online.
How to measure the popularity for free?
The best tool ever is "Google Adwords Tool". This tool will tell you how many people are searching for this keyword either exactly, or included in another phrase. Furthermore, you will get an idea about related keywords and how often they have been searched. This way, you can have a good impression about your keyword's popularity.
Why do I recommend this tool?
Google Adwords Tool has an incredible key feature, which is showing the search trends distributed over the last 12 months. This graphical distribution gives a real image about how popular a keyword is. If the search volume is almost equally distributed, then I would opt for this keyword.
What should you avoid here?
For some keywords, Google will tell you that they have an average of 3000 searches per month. So, beginners will hurry to optimize their blog posts around this keyword, which is not true.
Search volume trends can tell you that, for example, search volumes were very high in the first 3 months of the year and they go lower and lower in the most recent months. This is an indication that this keyword is no longer a popular one. I.e. avoid it, though it has an "average" search volume of 3000 searches per month.
What is your next step after popularity check?
It is simply to check the competition. To do this, you should follow 3 steps:
Step (1): type your keyword in quotes in Google. This will give you the number of pages that are optimized exactly for this keyword. I would keep a distance to each keyword that returns number of pages more than 100,000.
Step (2): type the keyword like allintitle: keyword. This will give you the number of websites that have this keyword in their titles. This means these websites are somehow well optimized for this keyword. If the returned number of sites exceeded 50,000, I would look for another keyword.
Step (3): type the keyword in Google with no quotes: Just have an idea about the type of the websites that occupy the first 10 positions in Google. I would look for another keyword, if my competitors are well-established authority sites, e.g. Wikipedia.com, ehow.com, or any other sites with page rank above 5.
