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How to find great SEO keywords is the holy grail of Internet marketing and is the single biggest reason a marketer is successful online.
Too many marketers pick keywords without really knowing for sure that the keyword has commercial value or it will be possible to rank in the top 3 listings of the search engines with the minimum of effort.
Whilst there are many great paid keyword research tools available, a couple of which I use and will review in a later article I will focus on a technique using just free tools. There is no hard and fast formula to apply and finding keywords very much depends on the niche involved, however applying the following strategy will produce keywords that have a commercial value and a realistic amount of competition to enable gaining a page 1 listing in a short period of time easily achievable.
To begun with enter a seed keyword in the Google keyword tool, Make sure you are logged in for the maximum results available.
In the box “word or phrase” enter you seed keyword, this should be 2-3 words long, click on “advanced” options and complete the following Location is Usa and language is English. Filter Keywords as follows:-
Global monthly searches = more than 10000 per month
Competition = Tick “low” can always add “medium” if insufficient number of low competition keywords comes back.
Estimated CPC = £1 Click to search and results will display for all related keyword phrases.
You now have a list of keywords with a minimum number of global searches per month and advertisers paying a Min of £1 per click in ad-words.
Always check the exact match search volume next, this is all that really matters, if this is low it is pointless trying to rank for the keyword. Now we need to look at the competition to see if we can rank for this keyword easily enough.
Looking at the number of competing pages does little to uncover the real competition, all that matters is the actual strength of the top 3-5 listings, the recent Panda review has provided many more opportunities to rank for keywords once though of as almost impossible because of the way Google now view website quality.
Using Common sense is required here to actually do some research into the strength of the competition. Next step is to fire up SEO Quake, its a free add on to Mozilla Firefox, an Internet browser ( Go here to download the tool free )and this tool provides information like the page rank, no of back links etc for each site which will help in making your final selection, look at the top 5 results, ideally the top 5 listings should have no high authority sites with Pr of 3 or more or sites with thousands of back-links established . At this point we are looking for keywords with web 2.0 sites listed, squidoo lens, hub pages, video sites and any article directories like ezine articles are all great indicators that a quick listing is possible.
Once you have completed this process successfully you have a keyword with commercial value and low quality competition from non authority web sites that you can rank for relatively easily.