Alexis Kestler
Search remains the most frequent activity on the internet, meaning if someone needs some information, he or she just searches it on Google or one of the other search engines available, although Google is the most used search engine around.
It is absolutely imperative, therefore, that your content is easily found via the search engines. Submitting a sitemap and Metatags to Google does not always ensure a full search engine visibility.
Different people might use different phrases or words while looking up the same information – we don’t all speak the same way, and there are various differences between how each of us searches the Internet.
With that in mind, this article guides you through 10 tips for effective keyword research that will help improve your keyword researching – enabling you to zero in the most appropriate keywords for your posts.
Understand the basics of SEO
To start with, make sure that you clearly understand the search engine crawling process as well as all the basic of search engine optimization. Google offers exceptional resources for webmasters and they have even put together an eBook called search engine guide, which you can refer to for all the queries you may have on search engine optimization.
Use Google Products
The other important tip for effective keyword research is utilizing all the Google products such as Google suggest, trends and suggestions on search results pages as well as Google Adwords keyword tool. There’s a reason these products work, and this is because they have been tailored to Google’s standards.
Research your audience
Find out what terms your audience use to describe your services or products. Further look for other relevant terms that your audiences use in their day-to-day-lives. To get these phrases or terms you should look at forums, support requests, LinkedIn groups and blog post comments. This type of research is heavily used in social media marketing.
Find the search terms currently in use
Using your Google Webmaster tools, weblogs and analytics tools, find out what search terms your audience is using to reach you. If you have access to your internal site search, look at those words too, to see what people are searching.
Study the competition
After you have determined what is working and what is not for your business, go a step further and find out what is working for your competitors. Conducting competitive research is a vital element for deciding what keywords you should target. If your website is relatively new, and you are competing against well-established sites generating high traffic, you usually don’t want to target the same keywords they target. The reason for this is that they have already established themselves at the top of Google’s results.
Analyze the Keywords
Conduct an analysis of the keywords used by other blogs and sites in your niche. SEOmoz has a good tool, used by many established, known as keyword extractor, that lets you extract keywords from any web page. Just enter the URL to get keywords.
Incorporate long tail keywords
Try incorporating long tail keywords based on your main keywords. For instance, if your main keyword is “blog”, long tail keywords associated with it can be “what is a blog”, “how to blog” as well as “how to create a blog”. Certainly your long tail keywords should be relevant to what your post is about.
Synonyms
After you finish a group of the main keywords, research their synonyms as well as related words that people may use to look for information that you are offering.
Look for similar posts
Google your article title as well as researching similar posts appearing on the first search engine page. There is a reason why they are on that page, so try to analyze where and how they have been used in the article.
Don’t write for the search engines
Finally, write for your audience. Do not manipulate your sentences for keywords. Just include them only where they can occur naturally or with slight adjustments.
Using these 10 tips when researching keywords is likely to throw up some unexpected opportunities for success. Knowing how to use them in your content is key to bringing you ranking success.
