Finding The Golden Keyword

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

Does Google Need Our Content?

Straight in today, does Google need our content? And how do we find out?

Google serves up results based on an algorithm which basically is a fancy piece of software that collects and sorts web pages. This software is highly secret or otherwise webmasters would just analyse it and find ways of artificially increasing their web sites rankings.

Like scientists who discover planets in the far off galaxies we can’t directly observe this algorithm, we can only measure it by the effect it has. Oh my god!!

There a few ways of determining whether Google will want the content we produce based on our keywords and although perhaps not entirely accurate it is based again on best guess.

So, we have found a keyword phrase of three to six words, now what? Well first we need to know how much other information is already out there that Google knows about.

The simplest way to do this is to go the the search engine and type in our keyword. Google will return a list of results with an indication of how many pages it thinks is relevant to the search. If you get a return of over two million you may want to start over.

Now to refine this very broad search is to enclose your keyword in quotes i.e. “keyword phrase” and search again. You will notice that now there are much fewer returns. This is called exact search and identifies pages that contain the exact phrase, hence the name. This gives you a much better indication of how many other pages you will be competing against.

As a rough guide I like to look for competition numbers of less than 50,000 and the lower the better. After you have done this there are a couple of other ways to gauge the work you will have to do but we will discuss them next time.

Keyword Research Baiting The Hook

How we all doing?

Right, how do we find out the right keyword to use as our bait?

I am going to point out a couple of rules now that will at least give you a way to make your decisions based on what I have found to be true.

1) A good keyword in the buying stage will be three to six words long.

2) A good keyword will have searches of over one thousand per month.

Ok for point number one lets look at why that might be true. Imagine you are a buyer and you want a widget, if you are ust deciding on buying a widget you will in all likelyhood type ‘widget’ into Google and look around to see what is available.

Moving on, you have already done this and you have decided that, yes, you want a widget but which one? A blue widget, a green widget? OK so now you type into Google ‘Blue widgets’ Now, you are narrowing it down and so you finally decide on a blue widget with fur on it.

Now you type ‘blue furry widget’ and buy one.

Now, lets look at the keywords:

Widget; 10000 searches per month, no sales.

Blue widget; 5000 searches per month, no sales

Blue furry widget; 1000 searches per month 10 sales.

Which keyword will you go for? 10000 visitors per month and no sales or 1000 visitors and 10 sales?

This series continues tomorrow….

photo credit: Ray Devlin

Finding Profitable Keywords | The Right Bait

OK so yesterday I said that profitable keywords are defined by at least two parameters :

1) There has to be a good number of searches for a keyword to be profitable, if no-one is actually typing a keyword into a search engine what is the point of it?

So, how do we go about finding these profitable keywords?

First off I am going to qualify that statement by breaking it down a little bit more. To make a keyword profitable it has to be searched for in Google and it needs to be a word or more usually a phrase which is at the buying stage of the visitor cycle.

I am going to take a shortcut here because it will save time, me and you. Any purchasing decision with the exception of sweets at the checkout will go through a cycle of three or more stages.

1) General research: The buyer will do some research on the widget they are thinking about buying. Note the ‘thinking’ part, no decision has been reached as to whether they will buy or not.

2) Product research: Having made the decision to buy a widget most people will have a look at what widgets are available. This is still not a buying stage, they may well purchase something but exactly what is still undecided.

3) Buying stage: Hoorah! The person has decided that they want a widget, model xyz and the wallet or purse is out. This is the visitor we want.

Now, all we have to do is place our baited hook in front of them and with any luck they will bite.

Tomorrow, finding the right bait. Stay tuned!

Using The Right Keywords

Keywords are not created equal and you could be wasting hours and hours of your precious time by picking the wrong ones.

I think everybody is aware that in order to make money online you will need to put in the work to find and qualify your keyword research.

No brainer, huh? Yes and no, I read pages and pages of articles on keyword research because it is my thing! I love it, creating content, boring, designing web pages, yawn, CSS, What???

But keywords, I love them. I like to picture myself as a fisherman and each of my keywords is a little baited hook in the ocean of the internet. Each and every one has the potential to make me money.

But, and it’s a big but, some bait is a lot more attractive than others, some will catch a few tiddlers, some will catch a big bass and just a few will get the marlin.

The question that arises is what is good bait?

A good keyword has to be defined by at least two parameters:

1) There has to be a good number of searches for a keyword to be profitable, if no-one is actually typing a keyword into a search engine what is the point of it?

2) Google has to require the information. I say Google but it applies to all search engines, from now on I will say Google only because it is quicker to type than all the search engines.

Tomorrow we will discuss these points in greater detail so stay tuned.

photo credit: Blyz

Free Keyword Tools

Hi

This is just a short post to put together a list of free keyword tools. There are lots of places to get keywords and it is essential that you put in the time to refine your keyword lists.

Having a spreadsheet to record your keywords makes life a whole lot easier and so I suggest you start a keyword master file that you can update and modify as those all important keyword phrases come in.

To start with the main free keyword tools are:

Free Wordtracker

Keyword Discovery

Google Adwords Tool

Ebays Popular Search Terms

Paypal Shops Finding products to promote

Shopping.com Find out what people are looking to buy

Googles Search Based Tool

All these tools can be used to discover keywords that are being punched into search engines every day. Do not become to hung up on search counts as long as there are more than about twenty per day you can still be making money.

It is the long tail keywords that are easiest to rank for, say phrases between three and six words as these are generally people in the buying phase of research.

Someone who types in “Red widgets” is usually looking for information and are in the pre-buy mode but someone who searches for mink fur red widget is normally looking to buy. They have done their research and have decided that they want a mink fur red widget and so will buy.

It is far better and much more profitable to be ranked on the first page of Google for a keyword with twenty searches a day than it is to be on page forty for a term with 1000 searches.

The money is often in the detail and so if you are promoting a niche product it will serve you better to write content around a particular term than try to encompass a whole niche at once.

For instance if you have a site pushing golf putters break it down into types of putter, mallet, half mallet, blade, belly putter, and then break it down further, Adams belly putters, Cleveland belly putters, Titleist belly putter and then break it down again, Adams 1201 belly putter, Adams 471 belly putter etc, etc.

The search count for an Adams 1201 belly putter may only be two a day but add that to two for the 471 and so on and you start to have a site with a large searching audience and more importantly a buying audience.

By using the free keyword tools you can easily break down any niche into a very profitable bunch of keywords and the site will almost build itself as you write small articles, one per keyword,  on each item and load them onto your pages.

PS. I made up the model numbers but you get the idea.