Keyword Money » Keyword Tools

Finding The Golden Keyword

Fletch — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:50:06 +0000

All of us are searching for the golden keyword, you know the one that has thousands of searches with no competition and a high priced affiliate product at the end.

Is this like searching for the golden fleece? Does it actually exist?

Like many affiliate marketers I was brought up on the dream of the golden keyword.Once upon a time it was easy to find the odd nugget but it is getting a little trickier now.

I see many affiliate marketers falling into the trap of spending so much time looking for the right keyword, the one that has X number of searches, competition under Y, that they don’t actually do anything but search. And they make no money.

For years we have been told to check keywords out by putting them in quotes and searching on Google to find out how much competition there is, this is OK up to a point but it really doesn’t tell you what you need to know.

The “quote” search only tells you how many pages are indexed with that exact phrase on the page, it is NOT an indication of competition. In any niche certain phrases will come up time and time again and they will be on a web page but that does not mean that the page is actually targeted for that phrase.

Example: Listen to any conversation about golf, how many times will terms such as ‘driver’ or ‘wedge’ come up? Yet the conversation may really be about The Masters, or ‘Golf Bags’ Related but unconnected and therefore not competition, the same applies to keywords and web pages.

The most reliable way to find the competition you are battling is to use these terms:

inurl:”keyword” Will return pages with the exact phrase in their url.

inanchor:”keyword” Will return pages with backlinks containing the exact phrase.

intitle:”keyword” Will return pages with the exact keyword in the page title.

If a web page has these features then it is a fair bet that it has been optimised for that phrase. This does indicate proper competition.

If, after checking the keyword for these factors you find that there is a lot of competing pages does that mean the keyword is no good? Not necessarily, you then need to check how strong these pages are by examining the Page Rank, the age, the number of backlinks etc.

Using a tool like SEO for Firefox this is a fairly simple procedure although a little time consuming. You can find keywords with seemingly thousands of competing web pages but on investigation the top ten results might have no pages with any PR or backlinks, these will be easy to beat.

On the other hand another keyword may have only a handful of competing pages but they are all PR5/6 with thousands of backlinks, you will spend years trying to get above those and possibly never will.

Keyword research is something you love or hate but it is a fact that you will not make money online without it.

Is there a golden keyword? Of course but you may waste months or even years looking for it, lower your sights and take action, find keywords you can target using the method above and then commit.

If you have the budget there is a tool that will do all this for you and more, it’s called MicroNicheFinder, it’s the one I use every day and I couldn’t live without it. See for yourself here

Keyword Tools I Use Part 1

Fletch — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:34:00 +0000

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

Fletch — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 09:31:08 +0000

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!