When talking about SEO the place to start is keyword research because if you get that wrong the rest will be a waste of time. I can’t emphasize this enough: If you screw-up keyword research you will fail, get it right and the rest is easy.You really can learn SEO.
If you are not familiar with keywords they are the words or phrases people type into the search engines to find what they are looking for. When I use “keyword” in this article it will refer to both individual keywords and keyword phrases.
If you are going to do keyword research you are going to need a good keyword tool. I use Market Samurai myself but have also heard go things about Keyword Elite. Both of these tools are over $100 and come with a free trail period. If that seems to steep for your wallet you can use the Google keyword tool for your traffic research and do the competition research manually. Some people also like Micro Niche Finder but I don’t feel it gives you all the competition information you need to make an informed decision.
Keyword research for SEO purposes involves 2 main components: 1. Is there ample website traffic for the keyword to end up being worth your time and effort and, 2. How much competition is there. Why don’t we start with how much traffic you’ll need.
This point right here can save you a lot of headaches- always do your research in exact match. Both phrase match and broad match will not tell you the actual traffic a keyword receives, only exact match. For myself I never go after a keyword unless there is at the very least one hundred searches per day in exact match. This of course is just the low end and doesn’t mean you should not try to find keywords with more traffic.
Now let’s talk about SEO competition. This is where Market Samurai can save you a lot of time and effort. You need to look at the sites that are showing on the first page of Google to determine how hard or easy it will be to rank for your keyword.
Don’t listen to those that say just do a search in quotes for your keyword and look for a certain number of sites being returned in the “out of X# of results” field. This does not give you enough information to truly determine the competition level as it only shows how many websites contain that phrase.
The most important factor when analyzing the sites already on the first page is links (to the page not the site) and the anchor text for those links. After that you’ll want to look at on-page factors, page rank and .edu/.gov links. I really can’t get into numbers here because you can rank for anything, it just depends on how hard you are willing to work. Let’s just say if they have not worked all that hard you won’t have to either. Go here for more SEO help.
