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

Comparipress WordPress PlugIn

Comparipress WordPress Plug In

Ben Johnson has informed me of a new wordpress plug in that he is developing that will make the difficulties of using price comparison plug ins a thing of the past.

Comparipress promises to be a simple to use plug in which will not involve signing up with several different merchants and yet give you the ability to feature items from lots of differing sources.

There will be no monthly fee, a drawback of several other plug ins and so you should be clearing profit sooner.

I myself am looking forward to a plug in that is much less time consuming, less work and offers great flexibility. Keep checking in and when Comparipress becomes available I will let you know ASAP.

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!