Lights Out Videos

Keyword Researching   by Kiri Hawkins

What is keyword research, you may be wondering? Well, it can easily be the difference between getting boatloads of traffic from Google or hearing crickets chirping around your blog. It can also be the difference between earning money quickly from your blog and dragging your feet for months at a time just trying to earn a dollar. Yup, it's literally that important.

In case you're wondering, keywords are a word, group of words, or phrase that is relevant to your blog, blog post, or blog page that you want to rank for in the search engines.

Keywords are desperately important for organic traffic from Google. Organic traffic is basically when someone types in a word or phrase in the Google search engine and a list of websites pop up. You've probably noticed when you search for just about anything on Google that there are thousands upon thousands of search results related to your search, but only 10 websites that appear on the 1st page of Google. One of the main reasons that those 10 specific websites appear on the first page of Google is because of their keywords.

Keyword research can be a very complex thing. You might think that it's as easy as using the keywords "weight loss" for your weight loss blog, but that would be a critical error. Why? Because "weight loss" is a high competition keyword, which means that thousands of blogs are targeting it, many of which pay a ton of money to rank for it and keep their ranking. It would very likely take you years to climb to the top 10 for such a keyword, if you were ever able to make it there at all.

So, what if you're in the weight loss niche? How do you ever rank for anything related to weight loss? The answer is in using what is called long tail keywords.

Long tail keywords are a group of 3 or more words that typically narrow down into something more specific that has far less competition. That probably sounds confusing, so I'll show you an example.

Bad keyword to target = "weight loss" = 165,000 exact match monthly searches with 114,000,000 competing websites

Better keyword to target = "best exercise for weight loss" = 2,400 exact match monthly searches with 62,300 competing websites.

I know that 62,300 websites still seems like a lot to beat, but trust me, it's a lot easier than beating 114,000,000 competing websites.

The example above isn't ideal. Ideally, you'll want to target keywords with at least 880 exact match monthly searches that have less than 30,000 competing websites. Targeting keywords at this level can help you get on the first page of Google with very little effort. Since you'll be blogging everyday, the traffic can quickly add up which will equal out to a nice paycheck.

You can do you keyword research using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. To use the keyword tool, type the main keyword that you want to look up information on in the search box, then click on the Search button. After the tool brings up a list of keywords, look in the left sidebar and tick on the box next to the word [Exact] to produce an exact keyword match list. Untick the box next to the word Broad. This is where you look to find the exact match monthly global search volume for your keyword.

To find out how many competing websites there are for your keyword, open up Google search engine and type your keyword selection into the Search box in quotation marks. For example: "weight loss". Click on the Search button and look underneath the search box for text that says something like "About 114,000,000 results (0.22 seconds)". That is the number of websites that are competing for the exact same keyword as yours.

You will want to use keywords in the title and domain name of your blog as well as for the titles of your posts. Your title does not have to be composed entirely of a keyword/keywords, but you do need to have the keyword/keywords that you plan on targeting somewhere within the title.

Coming up with a list of keywords can be a lengthy process. In fact, it can easily take hours just to find a handful of keywords that are worth targeting. Luckily, there are tools designed to make the process much faster.

About the Author

Did you enjoy this article on keyword researching? Then you should check out my website where I show you some of the best blogging sites.
Breaking Benjamin - Lights Out (Lyrics on screen)