Before ever doing any SEO, I always
research which keywords I want to target. I’ll use a real world
example that I currently hold the #1 ranking for in Yahoo and the #2
in MSN, so you can see how I did it. I’m still waiting on the
results for Google, since Google takes so very, very long to rank a
site these days. Besides, there are very good reasons for AdSense and
YPN publishers to focus on Yahoo and MSN instead of Google in their
SEO efforts. More on that in a little bit.
I have a blog called “Feline
Photos”, located at:
When I created it I had to decide
which keywords would get me the most traffic while not being too
difficult to rank for, so I did the research at my favorite research
tool, Digital Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool (it’s free):
I entered the term “cat” into the
search box to see what I’d get. Here’s an image of part of the
results:
As of the time of writing this
tutorial, “cat picture” is getting 1,600 searches a day in
Overture. It’s not in the Wordtracker list, but I’m rather more
inclined to trust Overture’s search counts since Wordtracker relies
on meta tag data and things that really have nothing to do with what
people are actually searching for. I like to see the comparison,
though, so I use Digital Point’s tool a lot.
Keep in mind that Overture does not
deal with plural keywords, it counts the plural searches as singular
searches. So I had to stop and think, would people be searching for
“cat picture” or “cat pictures” most of the time? In my mind,
“cat pictures” seemed like the more natural search query, so I
decided to target that as my primary
keyword for the blog. Also keep in mind that the search counts you
see are not the exact search counts for the search engines. Sometimes
the search engines get a lot more queries than what you see,
sometimes a lot less. What you’re more interested in is how the
keywords compare to each other in the list. If “cat pictures”
gets more searches than “feline pictures” according to Overture,
then chances are that “cat pictures” gets more searches than
“feline pictures” in the search engines, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment