subject: Choosing Keywords For Your Website [print this page] So you created a brand new website and you want to test out the waters. I would start by doing a pay per click ad campaign or try and get a few keywords ranked through doing SEO. The most important thing to do is your market research, and then you would do your keyword research. I have a planned process that I go through.
The same things apply for SEO and your pay per click ad campaign. There are some things I look for in a keyword that other people make the mistake in doing. I have 3 rules that I live by when picking the right keyword. You need to pick the keyword that has a lot of traffic. Then take a look at the surrounding keywords and try to rank for some of them.
Getting some keywords with a traffic flow is important. Getting the keyword information from the search engines is a relatively new process. When you pick your keywords if you're going the pay per click route, you need to pick something that has little competition. The biggest mistake that people make is they pick a keyword that is too hard for them. Most people start from scratch. So make sure you pick a keyword that will bring traffic to your site.
A top guru that I know talks a lot about this. It takes the same amount of work to become successful and the same amount of work to fail. Just think of all the work you have to go through to make it and make a plan for you to succeed. If you map out where you want to go, the less likelihood you are to not failing. If you pick a keyword that is to hard for you to rank with, you've done all that work for nothing. So start off with the lower levels of competition first.
The last thing you should do is to check the commercial value of your keyword. What I mean by this is you need to find out if people are buying things that have that particular keyword that you want to use. You need to see some proof that people are spending money in the market you are going into, particularly advertisers. If you pick some great keywords that have a large commercial value, you can get high quality advertisers for your site as well.
How can you tell if you picked the right keyword? Take a look at your competition. How hard is it going to be for you to knock someone off of their number one spot? If you pay your cards right you can get some traffic to your website. Many times the keywords that don't have much competition are the ones you should be trying out first.
