Money Making Keywords Explained
Keyword research is one of those things that we should ALL do more of. As businesses and marketers, we want to make attract the most customers and traffic to our sites as possible. A big mistake many business owners make is trying to rank for very competitive large search terms words rather than going for “money” keyword phrases called long tail .
Here is a great article explaining how keywords work.
Search Engines : who they are and what they really do
Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and all the other search engines currently don’t have the ability to look at images and tell what they are; (though it could be around the corner – who knows?). No, they must rely on words – specifically keywords or keyword phrases. Words, either individually, or strung-together are called ‘keywords’ and it’s these that the search engines are looking for.
“Keywords are the labeling system for every piece of information online. Without proper keyword ranking your website is doomed into oblivion” Jan Riley of LeadmastersUSA. SEO keyword services Atlanta GA
Long Tail Keywords are specific Search terms
For a good while, I really didn’t understand the difference between one-word keywords and what is now termed ‘long-tail keywords’, but now I do (at least I think I do!!).
Long tail simply means you have a string of words, probably up to about seven, and people typically type these into a search-box on their favorite search engine because they want to be as specific as possible.
Products, Services and Industry specific terms
Now, if you’re looking for a specific product, like my new Scooter which I just purchased (A Great Tank 250), then I could have found direct references to it by simply typing it’s model number OR ‘Scooter Tank 250″?. What turns up in the SERPS (search engine results pages)? Lots of results of companies either selling Scooters, or forums on popular Scooters (This is a great place to find out the specifics of each make and model).
General Searches mean Lots of Search results
If, however, I searched like this: ‘Best 250 scooter model’ then something very different shows up. Firstly, references to the words how, to, with and ‘a’ are all ignored, so the the only words that the search engines are interested in are scooter, best, model and 250.
The results are very different of course, bringing up millions of pages with ANY reference to any and all of these words.
Be Specific and Use singular and plural terms
To make your searches more targeted, you have to be specific. The easiest way to do this is to simply put your search term (long tail keyword) in speech-marks ” “ This tells the search engines that you are ONLY interested in EXACTLY what you typed. This often leads to NO RESULTS, but also you’ll often receive just a few VERY TARGETED results, and doing this will tell your search engine that you DO want to include the words ‘how, to, with and a’.If the results don’t get you what you wanted, you can simply rephrase your question and use similar words in place of your first ones.
“Search phrase keywords” is how your customers are searching
Try to think about how OTHER people say things. For example, do you often use the word “restaurant’? If so, try using the word ‘dining’. Do you use the word ‘house’? Try using the word ‘home’. You get the idea. People search in ways that don’t make grammatical sense, and they use terms they “think” might work , not necessarily industry correct terms.
A host of Free Tools for Keyword Research
There’s a great new (ish) tool from the people who give you (also free) Trellian WebPage called Keyword Discovery. While there IS (of course) and upgraded version available at cost, this is a great alternative to the free Google Adwords suggestion tool.
Give it a try; I think it will add some good words that Google doesn’t have.
Thanks Luke at Money making online for this great tutorial on Keyword research.
VIDEO ALERT
Here is a funky but informative video on how to find and use low competition keywords. His delivery and sets are unique, but the info is very good.
“Keywords are the labeling system for every piece of information online. Without proper keyword ranking your website is doomed into oblivion” Jan Riley of LeadmastersUSA. SEO keyword services Atlanta GA
