We’ve been talking a lot about domain names, and the mechanics of getting your blog launched. Within that discussion, we’ve mentioned keywords without going into much detail about what they are and how vitally important they are to marketing your blog and attracting attention to it.  

Let’s fix that right now…..

Simply put– a keyword is the word or words you type into the search engine to find information. The more carefully you research your keywords, and the more clever you are in weaving them into your content, the more likely it is that when you type your keyword into Google or another search box, you’ll find your page listed.

Why?

To understand the answer, you need to have a quick lesson on Search Engines 101.

There are three parts to the way a search engine works. Most everyone on the net has heard of the spiders crawling your page. The spiders don’t care about your color scheme or your pictures and great graphics. They are looking for text,  links and the URL they originate from. Links are the spiders favorite things since they lead them off to even more pages with text, links and URLs.

All of the information the spider collects as it crawls your page and through the rest of the web is collected by the second part of the search engine structure: the index. The index is what uses the famous or infamous, depending on your point of view, algorithm. This mathematical formula adds values to the words or word groups and the links it receives from the spiders. Those values represent the likelihood that this page and the information found there is exactly what the searcher is looking for. It stores all this information in a huge database.

The final piece of a search engine is the query/search function. Everyone knows this little box, and most of us use it daily. Looks simple…but it’s not. It’s really the front man for all the activity the search engine conducts day in and day out. When you type in your keyword, you are tapping into all the information the spiders collected and the index has rated then stored in the database.

Now, this is the important thing to remember. All your text and links are stored in the data base. BUT, your information only comes up when the exact keyword on your page is searched for. If you build your blog content around keywords that no one searches for—no one will ever find you and experience your great content. Wouldn’t that be a shame?

We’ve covered a bit of the steps on researching keywords. But I’m going to review them quickly, so it’s all in one place. Some of the good free resources are listed below.

http://wordtracker.com/freetrial and http://www.keyworddiscovery.com (free trial) and NicheBot.com ($1 for 14 days) Now, please understand there are paid resources of these, but they are wildly expensive and beyond most of our budgets when we are just starting out. The fact that they are expensive is just more evidence of the importance your keyword research plays in your success. These software makers know without well researched keywords you have little chance of being successful no matter how much work you put into your blog posting and trying to get backlinks. I started out using the free ones.The information I gathered on keywords grew my business and traffic just fine.

Keyword research is a lot of work. Smart marketers view it as an ongoing process. That’s why you keep your work in the spreadsheets you will want to keep adding to your keyword group little by little. I have a niche that has over 3,000 researched popular keywords in it. But that’s overkill…it’s my *retirement* cash cow that I’m thinking will become my empire down the road. You can start with 500 to a 1000. You can add to them as you grow. It is worth the all time and effort you invest in it. Your payback is targeted traffic which hopefully will become loyal readers. Your use of popular keywords gets them on your page; your stellar content keeps them coming back or gets them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

When you are doing keyword research, get an excel speadsheet up, titled, and ready to go. You will want to save all your work. Some programs have a import feature, but it may or may not work with your version of the spreadsheet. So you may have to resort to copy and paste. Here’s a quick run down on the 3 steps for keyword lists:

  1. Start with the generic keyword for your niche and type it into the keyword search tool. You’re going to get a list of words. The most popular (highest searches) to the least popular. Put them in your spreadsheet. Most beginners quit here. But that’s a mistake.
  2. Drill it down to find words that are categories of your generic keyword. There will be some in your first list. Using a thesaurus can also be helpful. Copy them to your sheet.
  3. Search each of these related words to discover even more keywords. Add them into your spreadsheet. If you can get the import feature to work, import them to another sheet–at the end you can merge all the lists.

So… now you have this huge list.

What does it all mean? and How do you use it?

The first list you found is from the generic keyword. It will have the most popular searches . The problem with stopping here with this list is these keywords are also the most competitive words. It’s hard to get noticed, if there are 5 million other pages using that keyword. You will use these keywords, of course, but they will not help you raise your ranking until much farther along in the life of your blog.

In your second and third list, you are going to find combinations of words that are being searched. These are commonly referred to as long-tail-keywords. They often include the generic word or a related word plus a qualifier. The qualifier could be a geographic location, a name brand, or a specific model number. These may or may not be up at the top among the most popular. However, if you use these long-tail-keywords in your content, you can be certain that when someone comes to your page after typing it into the search engine. You’ve got exactly the information they are looking for. They have already done some work to search this specific keyword…and they are looking for information. They are targeted and probably very ready to buy a product from you if you have one. So, while you won’t get  the quantity of traffic with these keywords, the quality is nearly exponentially higher.

In your final merged list, you will be keeping your eye out for keywords that have the rare combination of mid-range searches and little competion. If you’re really lucky, you can stumble across some that have none. This is where the mysterious entry: KEI comes into play. The figure for Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI describes how good your chances are for being ranked for that word if you use it in your content. We recommend, in the beginning,  you concentrate on the ones with KEI of 20 or higher. By all means if you find one with 1000 KEI jump right on it and start marketing it right away with a post, articles, and links.

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