How do I know which keywords to target?

The most important task you will have is determining which keywords you should target on any given page of your website.

I say “any given page of your website” because you should optimize each page individually. Each page on your site needs to be able to stand on its own as far as ranking for keywords on that particular page.

This enables you to bring in visitors on many different keywords and keyword phrases instead of just the few that your home page will be optimized for.

I don’t recommend simply copying and pasting each page and then modifying the content. You should take the time and start each page from scratch.

This enables you to better optimize each page for the keywords you are hoping to target. You want to try and take full advantage of the potential traffic you can get by having many ‘doorways’ into your site.

The more doors you have, the more traffic you can get. View each page as a new ‘doorway’ into your site through which Web surfers can enter.

Although your first instinct will be to go with more popular terms such as music, marketing, or cars, you should narrow the scope quite a bit.

Some reasons for not optimizing your pages for these types of keywords are:

1) They are too broad - If your website is about Rap music, would you want to attract thousands of Country music or Gospel music fans? Even if you are tempted to answer ‘yes’ to that question, you should say ‘no’. These visitors won’t be interested in your music, and will quickly leave in search of a site that fits their interests.

2) Too much competition - You will have a much more difficult time getting a high ranking on the search engines when you use these more general and more popular terms because you will have literally millions of websites all trying to get the same spot you are.

3) Too much time and effort involved - If you decide to try and compete with the other millions of webmasters out there trying to get into the top 25 or so listings, you’ll spend an awful lot of time trying to get there, and spend even more trying to keep your position!

I’m sure your next thought will be: “Okay, I’ll go for Internet Marketing, or Rap Music, or Used Cars!”

Well, that does narrow things down a bit, but these phrases will still have a ton of competition.

The better (and more profitable) approach is to search for keywords and keyword phrases that meet both of the following:

1) Popular - They are searched for by a lot of people

2) Have little competition - It is so much easier to get a high ranking (and stay there!) when you target keywords that have little competition.

The key to success with the search engines is to find keywords that many of your potential customers are searching for, but that few of your competitors are optimizing for.

How in the World do I do that?

The absolute best resource you’re going to find online for finding keywords that fit the above criteria is: WordTracker

They offer a free trial, and if you need to have access to the more advanced reporting features, or would like to research other search engines not offered in the trial, you can subscribe to their service for a small fee.

The trial will work just fine, but if you decide to get serious, this will be the best money you spend. Each time you add a new page to your website you should research the best keyword phrases and optimize that page for them.

Since this is such a valuable resource, and because this part of your search engine strategy is so important , I’m going to give you a quick tutorial (complete with screen shots!) of how to use WordTracker to find the best keywords.

Obviously you’ll need to have a general idea of what the subject of your website is, or is going to be, and then click here to go to the WordTracker website.

Once there, find and click on the Trial link. You will then be asked to enter your name and email address to start your trial. (They will send the results to this email address, so make sure you enter a valid address.)

Make sure you check the box to get the weekly Top 500 Keywords report! This is a very useful email that you’ll get once a week that will show you the most popular keywords for that week.

Then you’ll see the following:

For this example I’ll enter in “marketing” and click Proceed, which will then bring up a list of related keywords and phrases:

You will have a left window and a right window, and when you click a keyword it will display the results in the right window.

By clicking on marketing, I get this result in the right window:

This list gives various keyword phrases with the word “marketing” in them, and sorts them by number of searches.

What you will then do is click on a few of these keywords to add them to your basket (don’t worry, this will make more sense after you’ve gone through it once.)

After you’ve added a few of these keywords to your basket, click the link to move to Step 3.

This step gives you some choices that are only available in the full version, so just click the link to go to Step 4.

Step 4 is where you’ll find the good stuff!

The important information on this page is the KEI Analysis. This gives each keyword a rank based on how popular the keyword is, and how much competition it has.

A low score means that either not many people search for the keyword, or that there is too much competition for it.

The amount of competition is determined by searching for each keyword on the selected search engine, and finding out how many sites come up in the results.

What you want is a good mixture of popularity and competition … or lots of popularity and little competition!

If you look at the scale just above the table in this graphic you will see what KEI numbers will mean you have found a good keyword or keyword phrase.

In this example it appears that I didn’t find any good keyword choices.

But, another search I ran found these:

As you can see in that list, there are a few terms that have a very high KEI ranking. This means that these would be good keywords to target because they have a good ratio of popularity to competition.

This is exactly what you are looking for when trying to find the best keywords to target for your website or for individual pages on your website.

When you choose keywords that are popular and that have little competition, you’ll be able to quickly get your site into the top results for that keyword.

The following articles will show you what you must do to make sure you take the right steps to take advantage of the great keywords you discovered during the above process.

Edit : These is a new upgrade from Wordtracker that gives more accurate results. If you find that you liked Wordtracker, you should try KeywordSpy.

KeywordSpy - keyword research technology