ARTICLES - Keyword Research Basics

Keyword research is most critical for your search engine marketing campaign as you need to find keywords and key phrases that people actually search for.

You will think to yourself, this is what I sell so it's obvious this is what people will search for, not always the case. Without any keyword research it really is a guessing game.

Just do it! Get a free trial at Keyword Discovery

When you think about the time you can spend on getting those search engine positions you so desire, all the trial and error and guessing wrongly what keywords to use, it definitely pays to use keyword research tools to find the right keywords to use.

The Google Search and What people type

If you were a furniture company you would most likely want to be found on the first page of the search engines for the keyword "furniture", this is possible but try to find alternative key phrases.

Google will show you a whole list of keywords and phrases that others have typed in before, such as glass dining room, or contemporary dining room furniture if you were to type into its search the keyword furniture.

These would be much easier to achieve than a single word and these are keywords people do type in.

Today, the search in Google for furniture came back with 162,000,000 results

• dining room tables 28,900,000 results
• contemporary dining room furniture 1,120,000 results
• dining room furniture 8,560,000 results

You can see the difference in the results.

Local Searches - Going Local
If you are looking for local enquiries from your area only, say you were a local tradesman like a carpenter or a home extension firm you would use key phrases that included your local area, such as your town or city.
Such as; landscape design boston.
There really wouldn’t be much point in finding a carpenter or builder hundreds of miles away as no one will be willing to travel all that far for a small maintenance job.

Keyword Tools
There are so many keyword research tools out there today; some are very good while others are completely useless.
The best by far I believe are, Wordtracker and Keyworddiscovery, there are others too and these do cost but they are well worth it in my opinion.

You can find good keywords using Google adwords for example, and there is also the Yahoo adwords program.

I have added the links to Word Tracker and Keyword Discovery as I have used both of these and they work for me, there are other keyword research tools that I have not used so if anyone has any other suggestions, please feel free to let us know so we can add them here to help everyone.

Keyword Tool provides keyword ideas
You can try the keyword tool from Google
It’s brilliant, you just type in your website and then a few keywords and it will find other keywords and phrases you can use too.
It’s really for Google Adwords but just have a play with it as it does give some great keyword ideas.

How many keywords per page?
You really should only optimise each page with no more than two keywords, preferably, key phrases.

If your website sold wedding dresses, you would optimise your home page for something like Designer Wedding Dresses, Discount Wedding Dresses.
No point in using just Wedding Dresses be clever.
You would have links to pages called Ivory Wedding Dresses and this page would only be optimised for that phrase; Ivory Wedding Dresses and with all your other pages you would do the same.
Too many people will have their keywords in their home page and title and all other pages would have the same, you're not going to get anywhere like that.
I usually put the key phrase in about once every 90 to 100 words but make sure you have in your first sentence.

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