Even More Keyword Research

Hi all,

I hope we are all grabbing some coin, and starting to make a living online. This is part six, I think of my mini series on finding profitable keywords.

The point we are covering today is, does Google want or need your information? I read every day on the various forums that I visit, Google does not like affiliate sites!, Google does not want anyone to make money online! Google de-indexes Squidoo, Bans, PHPBay sites.

Let me tell you, this is complete b*ll*cks. Google does not hate affiliate sites, build a niche store sites or any kind of site per se. What Google does like is information, it eats it up and if you can feed it something it has not had before it is your best friend.

Hear what I’m saying? Unique content, people! I will yell that at you UNIQUE CONTENT!!!

Point two was ‘Does Google need your content? Think about this for a minute. Google is the number one search engine and it got to that position by serving up web pages to searches that it thought were relevant.

OK, it’s not perfect but then nothing is, there are many billions of web pages and trying to sort them into what is relevant and what is not is one hell of a job.

Let no one tell you they know the secret of Google. They don’t. ( unless they are Matt Cutts of course) We as affiliates work on what can only ever be, best guess because Google or Matt Cutts aint telling, so what is best guess. Lets look at it from Google’s point of view.

Google does not care if you earn money online, Google does not hate affiliates. What Google cares about is providing their customers with information about the keyword the customer provided. So all we have to do is feed Google with info that it has not had anywhere else.

This is easier said than done of course but by producing unique content we have a head start. We need to do a little research to find out what it needs….continued tomorrow….

Keyword Tools I Use Part 1

Anybody trying to make money online or just get their web pages seen needs a couple of keyword tools. Here are some I use and one I don’t.

There are numerous keyword research tools available some free, some very expensive but the cost or otherwise is not neccesarily an indicator of how good they are. I use several different things to help me decide which keywords to target.

The Google Keyword Tool

This is a good first choice if you are starting out. Although free it will give you a headstart in the search for keywords that you may not of thought of yourself. The drawback is that you then have to flip backwards and forwards between the keyword tool and the search pages to get the competition numbers. The Google Keyword Tool is here

Mozilla Firefox and SEO Extension.

If you use the  Google Keyword Tool the Firefox browser with the SEO extension is a must. It allows you to get so much information at one place it is priceless. Firefox and SEO

Those are the free tools and they have their place on your computer however if you intend to get serious there are some paid tools which are worth considering. The best thing about them is not the information that they get you, you can get that for free as I have said, the best reason for buying them is the enormous amount of time that they can save.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a subscription tool that charges a monthly fee for access. It is a very popular keyword research tool for affiliate marketing and avoids the pitfalls of many desktop based tools in that you are using their bandwidth and proxy servers. You have a variety of tools in one and it is quite quick, the drawback for me was the monthly fee. If you are researching keywords a lot then this is a great tool and worth the money. Personally I look for a bunch of keywords in one go and then concentrate on content so I wasn’t using it to the full, however if you are into bum marketing or article writing this is heartily recommended. Find out about the free trial here

Microniche Finder

This is my favourite keyword tool at the moment. There, I said it, for the price this research tool is incredible. I am an affiliate niche marketer at heart and MNF allows you to get to keywords and search terms so quickly it is worth twice the price in my opinion. This is a one off payment keyword research tool that sits on your computer,I will be putting some posts up about how to get the most out of it but in the meantime check it out here.

Keyword Elite

In my opinion-Don’t bother! Sometimes hype and advertising overcome actual product. Think Windows v Mac, if your’e old enough think VHS v. Betamax. I did use this keyword tool for some time and occasionally it worked very well, but, most of the time it locked up, required captcha codes to be entered every 30 seconds and frequently got me banned by Google. This very expensive tool in my opinion is a waste of time.

Keyword Research & Page Rank

I would like to expand on the previous post regarding keyword research and the methods of determining the quality of a search term or keyword.

As I said Page Rank is a factor in deciding on whether you want to target a particular keyword.  Now perhaps this is not as clear to you as it is to me, but I have been doing this for quite a while and sometimes forget that other people have not got to the same stage .

When you perform any keyword research part of the equation is the competition and how strong is that competition. If you find a search term that has a lot of searches and few results pages, is that a good keyword?

On the face of it, yes, high search/low results= Good! But there is another factor and that is the PR (page rank) of the sites that are listed in the return. Lets research the term ‘fuzzy red widget’ Hey there are 120,000 searches a month, thats a lot of searches, lots of people want fuzzy red widgets!

Lets say there are only 5000 results for the term ‘fuzzy red widget’, this looks promising but if the PR of each page is between 7 and 10 you will have a lot of trouble getting your page anywhere near them. Remember PR is a measure of importance determined by Google and so a high PR is harder to beat than a low one. It may have 120,000 searches but you will never get any of them.

Lets try again, ‘red hairy widgets’ has 50,000 searches each month and there are 50,000 results. This does not look brilliant, fewer searches and more results. But, hang on, the PR of the sites on the first page never gets above 2, this means that you have a very good chance of beating any one of them. This would get you on the first page with a term that is searched for 50,000 times a month. Excellent!

Before you go checking up on me, the figures above are imaginery.

There is a tool that can speed this whole process up and it is free. The best browser around is Firefox, if you haven’t got it go get it now. You can download it for free here. Once you have that head on over here to get the seo Firefox extension. This allows you to view PR, back links, page links and much more. Once again it is free!