Yesterday we talked about traffic and how you can get more visitors from sites who are already sending new readers to you. Today we’ll focus on how to use keywords to increase both your rankings and thus your traffic to your site.

In particular we are going to optimize for those keywords that you are already getting traffic for. To find out what your site is ranking for, log into your Google Analytics account, click on “Traffic Sources” and then “Keywords”. You’ll find a list of keywords your site is ranking for and how much traffic each of them is bringing you.

If you don’t yet have Google Analytics installed or aren’t familiar with it, here’s a short repot you can download that will give you a good overview. Google Analytics Made Easy (PDF)

When I pull up a keyword report in Analytics for this site for example, some of the keywords that pop up are:

• how to use aweber
• how do I ping my blog
• affiliate marketing blog
• how to find affiliate programs on my niche
• adwords keywords review
• aweber blog broadcast
• how to create link redirects in emails
• how to use aweber on wordpress
• affiliate marketing goals
• best niche markets
• bleeding link juice
• clickbank commission theft

Once you have your list, it’s time to do some sorting. I like to separate them into two categories. Keywords that match and are optimized for existing content and keywords I can create more content around. Let me give you some examples based on the list from above.

Keywords like “how to use aweber” and “how do I ping my blog” are phrases that I deliberately optimized blog posts for. I’m keeping an eye on those, check how well I’m ranking for the keywords and then work on building links to rise higher on page one of Google for them.

Other terms like “how to find affiliate programs on my niche”, “adwords keywords review” and “bleeding link juice” for example are terms I’m getting a little bit of traffic for each month, but they aren’t keywords I’m actively going after – YET. They are just terms I happen to be ranking for because I’m using them somewhere in my content already.

I keep a running list of these keywords and turn to it whenever I need new ideas for things to blog about. It would be pretty easy for me to write a post titled “Are You Bleeding Link Juice? Here’s How To Stop It” . In fact, I’m going to save it as a draft title right now and you can expect to see the post on this blog within the next few weeks.

By keeping an eye on the keywords you are already getting traffic from and either improving current rankings for the posts you’ve written around the phrase or by creating unique optimized content around them on a regular basis, you can easily increase your search engine traffic to your site or blog.

P.S. Here’s another post I wrote a while back about keyword research skills. It has quite a few additional tips for getting more traffic to your site through targeting the right kinds of keywords.

Developing Good Keyword Research Skills

Getting good at keyword research really isn’t all that hard. I know it seems like a daunting task at first, that involves a lot of number crunching and market analysis, but the good news is that it really. There are plenty of tools out there that will make your life easier and using them is just a matter of jumping in and giving it a try.

Here’s my step-by-step approach to keyword research. Copy it, then modify it until you find your own style. Then just get into the habit of doing keyword research before you write just about any new piece of content.

Step One – The Idea

I usually start with an idea of what topic I want to write about. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing a blog post or article, creating a squidoo lens or even sending a tweet, it all starts with the idea of what this new piece of content is going to be about.

Step Two – What Are People Searching For

Once I have the idea, it’s time to find out exactly how people are searching for this type of information or product. We find these keywords by using one of the many keyword tools out there. I happen to like wordtracker, but you can certainly use any other keyword research tool as well.

Take a look at my “What Is Keyword Research ” post to learn more about it and to find a quick review of several of the more popular keyword research tools out there.

Step Three – How Hard Will It Be To Rank

My next step is to take a look at how hard it will be to rank for a particular keyword. It’s good to strike a balance between lots of traffic and how many links you will have to build to rank. For most of the new content I’m adding I choose keywords that only have a few serious competitors. These keywords usually include three or more words and are considered long tail keywords.

Take a look at this post to learn more about Long Tail vs. Short Tail Keywords.

How tdo you find out how hard it will be to rank? There are several different ways to do it. The hard  way is to simply type the keyword into Google. Then look at how well optimized the pages that show up on the first page off Google. Do they have the keyword in the title? Does it appear in the content as well? Then plug the page url into yahoo site explorer and take a look at the backlinks for each of these pages. The more links that are pointing to the page and the greater the authority of the site the page is on is, the harder it will be to rank.

The easy way to do this type of research is to use the paid version of wordtracker. This is what I use and it saves me quite a bit of time each day.

Step Four – Choose The Actual Keyword

Once you have your data, it’s time to pick a keyword. Again you want to balance the amount of traffic you can get with how hard it will be to rank. For most of my content pages (individual blog posts and articles for article directories), I aim for a competition of under 25 people who are really trying to rank for the keyword. I get this data out of the keyword report generated by wordtracker.

Step Five – Incorporate It Into Your Content

Next it’s time to use the keyword within the content. I make sure I include it in the title as well as once or twice throughout the content.

Step Six – Build Some Links

Last but not least, it’s time to build some links to the new page that include the keyword as part of the anchor text. I usually start with some internal links (links from my own site that point to the new page), and then move on to building external links through social bookmarking, article marketing, guest blog posts etc.

To learn more about building links, sign up for my link building program. Over the course of 13 weeks I teach you various link building strategies that will help you ensure that you are ranking for your keywords.

Just follow these steps a few times as you write new blog posts, articles etc. and before you know it this process will become a habit.  Keep in mind that each time you create a new optimized page, you will get a little (or sometimes a lot) more free search engine traffic. That traffic can then be turned into subscribers, customers and loyal fans. That’s how keyword research skills help pay the bills and allow you to grow your online business.

P.S. Here’s some “further reading” for you. I wrote a guest blog post about keyword optimization in article marketing yesterday for NicoleOnTheNet.com that will give you some further insight into how I use my keyword research skills in article marketing.

You should also take a look at a post by my friend Trish Lindemood about Keyword Research Tips and Tools. While you’re there make sure you are signed up for her 90 day content challenge. I’m going through it right now and it’s a big help in not only creating more content for this blog but also making sure I market along the way.

I still can’t believe that we sat up there for 90 minutes and in essence created a crash course in keyword research that takes you from very basic to more advanced keyword strategies.

Here’s a little preview video with some of the content from the audio recording of our panel discussion.

Keyword Strategy Panel Preview

Download the entire 90 minute audio of this panel discussion.

Here are some of the questions we were asked:

• Why is keyword research important?
• How do you go about finding keywords?
• What are you doing with these keywords?
• How do you optimize pages outside your own website?

From there we branched out to all kinds of different subtopics including how to not get overwhelmed with all the data you get from your keyword research, what types of keywords to use in what context on your site, commercial intent keywords that put money in your pocket, changing the intent of a search and much more.

You can download and listen to the recording of this hour and a half long discussion for $17 (which is a steal). Get it, listen to it and be sure to take some notes. Then come back and and leave a comment letting me know what you have gotten out of this recording.

But one of my favorite aspects of attending this event is connecting with other marketers and “talking shop”. It is particularly rewarding if I can teach a little something here and there in conversations.

Yesterday for example I shared lunch and a great conversation about beginning SEO with Nicole Dean and Lain Ehmann. Lain piked our brains about a few topics but most of it focused around SEO. Her biggest problem is information overload. There are so many different articles, reports and products about SEO out there and everyone seems to have a slightly different strategy.

I broke it down for her into “SEO in a Nutshell”, which is just enough info about how you can optimize your pages and blog posts and get some rankings without getting too complicated. I thought I’d share with you today what I told her over lunch.

SEO In A Nutshell

There are only a handful of concepts you need to grasp to start optimizing your pages so you can rank for some keywords. Here they are…

Keyword Research

You can’t start to rank for something unless you know what you want to rank for. The “key” to keyword research is to find a term that strikes a balance between the amount of traffic you get and how hard it is to rank for it.

Let me give you an example:

I’ve been doing a little research recently on article marketing. Trying to rank for “article marketing” would be almost impossible. Yes, this keyword is getting a lot of traffic (it’s searched about 250 times per day), but there are  also a LOT of people trying to rank for that term.

By comparison let’s look at “best article marketing tips”. It’s only searched about 5 times per day, but there is so little competition for this keyword phrase, that you could probably write an article or blog post titled “My 3 Best Article Marketing Tips” and rank on the first page of Google with minimal work.

Find that balance between how often a term is searched and how hard it will be to rank for it.

If you want to learn a little more about Keyword Research, listen to this panel discussion I was involved in along with SEO experts Karon Thackston, Lynn Terry and Dan Morris. Here’s a picture:

Title Tag

Now that you have your keyword, you want to make sure it appears in the title tag of your new web page. If you are using blogging software like wordpress, just make sure your keyword is in the title of your post or page. If you are creating static html pages, make sure you add the meta title tag.

Our keyword example above was “best article marketing tips”, so I may use a little like “My Best Article Marketing Tips Revealed” as the title of my new blog post. If you can include your keyword as early as possible in the title, but also make sure it reads well and is interesting.

It is also a good idea to use the same keyword again somewhere in the first 100 words of your content.

The rest of this simple way to do SEO (search engine optimization) is all about links.

Internal Links

These are the links within your site and you want to make sure you use the keyword in the anchor text when you point to this new page. If you are using wordpress as your blogging software, it will automatically do this for you. If you are creating a static html site, make sure you are linking from your homepage or article page to this new page with “best article marketing tips” as part of the text that links to the page.

External Links

Now that we have the internal linking set up, it’s time to go out and get some links from other sites across the internet that have our keyword in the anchor text. For a long tail keyphrase like “best article marketing tips”, it shouldn’t take more than a few links to get it to rank. For a more competitive keyword, you want to spend more and more time building those backlinks.

By now you’re probably wondering where you can get those external links. Here are a few simple ideas.

• Write some articles and submit them to article directories.
• Write a guest blog post or two for a blog in your market.
• Submit your new page to a few popular social bookmarking and social networking sites.
• Comment on popular blogs in your market and link to the new page or post.

Yes, you can get a lot more complicated than that, but there is no need for most of us. If you can implement just these few things, you should see your traffic and ranking improve.

P.S.  If you are ready to learn more about backlinks (both internal and external), I would like to invite you to join my link building class at EasyLinkLove.com

Free Wordtracker Tool

If you’ve been doing this for a while, you may remember the old overture/ yahoo keyword tool. Once it stopped working, wordtracker stepped up with their own free version. It can be found here. You simply enter your keyword and click the “hit me” button. Here’s what it looks like:

Wordtracker will then go out and give you the top 100 searches that include your keyword as well as how often the term is searched per day. I used crockpot cooking in the search I did for the the picture above. If this is a niche you may be interested in, take a look at my crockpot niche pack.

Use the steps outlined in the Google keyword tool post to research your competition for each keyword.

Or if you don’t want to do all this by hand, consider using the ….

Paid Wordtracker Tool

What I like best about this particular tool is the fact that it does the analysis for me and presents me with a list of keywords that I can sort by how hard it will be to rank for them. More on that in a second.

By the way you can check out and try wordtracker here. They offer a free 7 day trial that I highly recommend you take them up on. Set some time aside during those 7 days to run some keyword reports for your niche.  You can export them and save them to use them later.

Where the free version of wordtracker only gives you the 100 most popular terms and the Google keyword tool about 150, the paid wordtracker version gives you 1000 keywords. In other words, you get a lot more long tail keywords to work with.

You can also save your keyword lists and organize them by project right within the software interface. This makes it easy to spend some time doing keyword research one day and end up with a huge list of terms to go after by creating website pages, blog posts and articles.

As I mentioned, my favorite part of this software is that it does the competitive analysis for me. I don’t have to check each and every keyword by hand. Instead I click a button and it does it for me. I can then pick the best keywords at a glance.

Here’s what a wordtracker keyword report looks like:

As you can see, you simply enter your keyword (we’re using crockpot cooking again as our example) in the box at the top, and click search. This will result in a list of up to 1000 keywords as well as the amount of searches (in other words how often that particular term is searched for in 24 hours).

Next you can click “Select All” and “get additional metrics”. It will take a few seconds and the end result is the data you see in the last three columns. I like to use keywords that give me a high KEI value, while also paying attention to the “In Anchor and Title” column.

If you are serious about attracting a lot of search engine traffic, and your website or blog is already making more than $100 a month, I would recommend getting a wordtracker subscription. If you’re not quite at that point yet, use one of the free tools, but also consider signing up for the free 7 day trial and make sure you sit down and generate quite a few keyword lists during that time. Then be sure to use all that data (no matter how you collect it) to great more optimized content for your blog or write some more articles that rank high in the search engines.

All the great content you’re writing isn’t going to do you any good if no one finds it.

How will they find it? That’s what we’re going to be talking about over the next few weeks. Your first step is to do your homework a.k.a Keyword Research.

Let’s talk about this a bit for the next couple of days.

What Is Keyword Research

Let’s start by defining what exactly keyword research is. It’s the practice to use various tools and databases to find out how web users search for the topics, products and information we have available.

We then use that information to optimize our various web pages so they have a better chance at appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPS), preferably on page on.

Why do we do this? For free search engine traffic of course :) Now let’s look at how we go about doing this type of research.

How To Do Keyword Research

Start by getting into the head of your target market. I like to imagine specific person that has all the characteristics of my target market. What would she be searching for to solve her problem, find out more about a certain product or to learn more one particular topic. I make a list of those terms. They are my seed keywords. I then put those terms into one or several keyword research tools to find out exactly how related terms are searched, how often they are searched for and how hard it will be to rank for that term.

Keyword Research Tools

I’ll give you a brief overview over each tool today. Throughout the coming days, we’ll look at each one closer. For now, take a look at them and play with the two free tools (the google keyword tool and the free wordtracker tool).  You may also want to sign up for a free trial for the Paid Wordtracker tool and give it a try.

Google Keyword Tool

This tool was originally developed for Google adwords advertisers, but has been opened to anyone. I’ve been using it for years to do some initial keyword research. Unfortunately it doesn’t give you any data on your competition, but there are ways to manually do this to see how competitive a keyword is. I’ll show you how in the next couple of days.

I also like using this tool to find out what keywords are in a particular page – good to know when you come across a competitors site.

Free Wordtracker Tool

This is another good tool, I like to look at both google and this tool to get a good initial feel for a group of keywords. Not that wordtracker shows you how often a term is searched in 24 hours, while the google keyword tool shows you monthly volume.

Paid Wordtracker Tool

This is by far the most efficient way to do keyword research. The data is pretty accurate and you can find out with the press of a button how many other pages are seriously trying to rank for your keywords. The paid wordtracker tool also gives you the most extensive list of keywords with each search. You can easily generate a huge list of long and short tail keywords with it.

Keyword Elite

This is a great way to organize and analyze your keywords. Unless you are planning to get into quite a few niches and do a lot of keyword research, I don’t think you’ll need it. You may also want to keep in mind that this tool works best in conjunction with some of the paid keyword services like wordtracker and keyword discovery.

Micro Niche Finder

When I’m using the google keyword tool and the free wordtracker tool, I like to use Micro Niche Finder to automate the competitive analysis. It saves a lot of time and tedious copying and pasting.

Why Bother?

Lastly, let’s look at why we would bother doing all this research. We already touched on the fact that we want to do keyword research to have a better chance at ranking high in the search engines. Let’s take a closer look at that. By choosing a keyword that we know people are searching for at least a few times a day, and using it in the title, our article or blog post as well as in links pointing to that page, we have a pretty good chance of ranking on the first page of the big search engines for that term.

This will bring us a steady stream of targeted visitors who are ready to learn more, join our lists or buy from us. We’ll discuss all of this in more detail in the days to come.

I’ll go into more detail on each of these tools and other keyword resarch related topics in the next few posts. Feel free to ask any questions on this topic in the comment sections as well.

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.