How To Get The Right Keywords and Keyphrases
One of the best skills you can learn when you are starting your affiliate and article marketing career is how to do keyword research. Today I’ll share how I go about doing just that.
I pay attention to keywords and keyphrases for every blog post and article I write and so should you. By carefully crafting your titles and the content of the posts, you dramatically increase your changes of driving lots of search engine traffic to your site and the articles you submit to article directories.
Let me start by explaining some of these terms I’m throwing at you here.
A keyword is a word someone might type into a search engine like Google. Here are some examples of keywords:
article, cooking, muffin, recipe, affiliate
A keyphrase is simply a combination of words someone might type into a search engine. Again, let’s look at some examples.
article marketing, how to write an article, best banana muffin recipe, list of affiliate programs
A keyphrase can be two or more words long.
Another important phrase and concept you want to familiarize yourself with is Keyword Research. This means that you pay attention to what other people type into the search box. From a Search Engine Optimization standpoint, it makes no sense to write an article about “Tony’s Pizza Copycat Recipe” to keep with the theme of our little case study, if noone searches for that phrase.
Which of course brings up the question of how you go about figuring out what people search for. I use the free keyword research tool over at wordtracker.
I start by entering a few general things I think a user might enter into a search engine to find something. Boy that sounded vague, didn’t it. Let me give you an example to illustrate.
Let’s say I want to write an article about copycat recipes. I’ll start by entering something general like copycat recipe, copy cat recipe or even restaurant recipe, or famous recipe.
Here’s the kinds of results I get in the keyword tool for “copycat recipes”
They “keywords” in the right hand side of this table are the terms people are searching for. The number in the left-hand column shows how many times each term is searched for approximately in 24 hours.
You can also click on each term to drill down further. Let’s take a look at what happens when we click on “copycat restaurant recipes” for example.
I usually do a good bit of brainstorming this way entering any type of term I can think of that’s related to the topic I’m researching. I paste all these keywords and keyphrases into an excel document and sort them by number of searhces they get. They are great tool for brainstorming new article and blog post ideas.
Here’s a look at my excel document for our Secret Restaurant Recipes case study.
The next question is of course which of these keyphrases to pick, after all they are quite a few of them. (5 minutes of searching and copying and pasting resulted in a little over 400 different keywords).
Your first thought might be to work on an article targeting “Restaurant Recipes” since it gets the most searches. Unfortunately it will also be a very hard term to rank for and your post will get lost among the millions of other pages that compete for this term. How do I know? I did a little more research, this time using Google.com
Go to google and type “restaurant recipes” in the search box. Here’s what you’ll get:
Did you see there are are over 30 million pages on the Internet related to the term restaurant recipes? That’s a lot of competition in itself, but what’s really going to concern us are the pages ranking for that keyphrase on the 1st page of google (since that’s where we’d like our article to rank).
Let’s take a look at the page that ranks number 1 then, shall we? It’s this website all-restaurantrecipes.com. At this point I like to look at the site itself and see how well they are optimized for the keyphrase in question. In this case the site uses “All Restaurant Recipes” in the title and also has “restaurant recipes’ sprinkled in the content on the page. The fact that they even use the keyphrase in their domain name helps a bit as well. All in all the do a pretty good job as far as “on page optimization” goes (I’ll explain on page and off page search engine optimization in another post)
Next I like to see how many links they have pointing to their page from other websites. It’s an important factor in ranking well and gives me a good idea of how hard I would have to work to outrank them. This is refered to as offpage factors by the way.
To get this information I go to yahoo.com and type site:www.all-restaurantrecipes.com into the search box. Once the results come up, I set the “Show InLinks” option to “Except from this domain” to exclude incoming links.
Here’s that this looks like:
As you can see, this site has over 14,000 links pointing to this page. I would have to do a whole lot of work and link getting to do to outrank this page.
By comparison, let’s look at a less competitive keyphrase like “copycat chicken wings recipes”. It is searched 78 times per day according to our keyword research. Let’s see what the competition looks like in google.
There are two things I’m noticing right away. The first is that there are a lot less pages overall competing for this term ( only 16,400). The other thing I’m noticing is that not a single one of them is using the exact key phrase “copycat chicken wings recipes” in their title.
Now let’s take a look at the page that’s ranking on #1 for this phrase. It’s a hubpage similar to the one we set up. If you haven’t read through building hubpages for affiliate commissions I encourage you to go do that now.
When we enter this site into the yahoo site explorer and remove any links coming form the domain, we get the following.
Notice that this page has only 9 links pointing to it from pages other than the hubpages.com domain. Now this we can compete with without a whole lot of effort.
To sum it up with could either spent weeks and months writing enough articles, blog posts and such to create the amounts of links required to rank one of our pages for “restaurant recipes”, or we could put up a hubpage, write and submit a few articles and rank for “copycat chicken wings recipes”. This could easily be accomplished in a day or two at the most. After that we can move on to another keyphrase that’s fairly easy to rank for and continue to do the same thing over and over again.
The reson the second strategy makes more sense is that there’s no guarantee we’ll ever be able to rank anywhere on page one for the first term, but it’s pretty likely that we can make it for the less competitive terms. Sure, there is less searches per day on those, but by adding quite a few of them together, they quickly add up.
This strategy is also a much safer buisness choice. I probably don’t have to tell you that you can easily lose rankings on a term. By spreading out among all kinds of different keywords and keyphrases and having all kinds of pages, websites and articles out there, it’s no big deal when one of them is dropped by google, yahoo or msn. If on the other hand you put all your time and effort into ranking just one page for a highly competitive term and all your traffic is coming from that one page and google drops it out of it’s index, your entire business and income are gone.
I’m going to spend some time this week to set up another hub page and then writing and submitting a few articles to point to the new hubpage. I’ll report on my results as part of the case study.
P.S. Now it’s your turn. Sit down and do some keyword research today and then get to work on one keyphrase that looks good to you. Feel free to post a comment with any questions or suggestions you may have.
You may also like to read:
- How To Use Keywords To Increase Rankings And Traffic
- Long Tail vs. Short Tail Keywords – What To Use When and Where
- Simple Strategy For Affiliate Commissions Part Two
- Fast SEO Rankings – An Example
- Building Hub Pages For Affiliate Commissions
Tags: how to get the right keyword, keyphrase, keyword, keyword research
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Ok, I’m sure this is a stupid question but where does the articles or hubpage point to? The affiliate site or your site?
Hi Cathy, not a stupid question at all. The articles and hub pages are pointing to a domain that I own which then automatically redirects to the affiliate product (in our case study example it points directly to the page that sells the copycat recipe ebook). Here’s the first part of the case study where I went over picking the product and then setting up the domain redirect. http://www.affiliatetreasurechest.com/9/simple-strategy-for-making-affiliate-commissions/
hello,
it is a very good article about keywords, but i still have a question, : how I should start the keyword analysis in my company web page? how should i choose the rigth keywords that could help to make a better traffic of the company by researching ?
I spoke about this during a keyword research panel this past weekend. (You can listen to the recording here). What I mentioned during the panel is that I like to put myself in the shoes of my target audience and then come up with some basic terms that they may search in google. I use those to start my keyword research and then use tools like the paid version of wordtracker to find out what specific keywords people are searching for and how hard it will be to rank for them.