Keywords
Lesson 5 from You Can Make Money Writing
Keywords are the words or phrases that people use when searching
for things online. The exact words they're typing into those
search engines are crucial to how you title your articles and
web pages, if you want these searchers to find these. Let's look
at another quick example of this...
A human would know that a page on "How to Earn More Income"
is at least related to "How to Make Money," but search
engines aren't that smart (they probably will be soon though).
It's possible that ten times as many people are searching the
keyword phrase "how to make money," or "make money,"
but you won't necessarily get any of that traffic if your page
is titled "How to Earn More Income" and uses the words
"earn" and "income" throughout, with only
a mention or two of "money."
Obviously, then, if you want to get traffic from search engines,
you need to know what words people are using in their searches.
You could guess, and this will work sometimes, but you'll surprised
how often there are better keywords than the "obvious"
ones. For example, if you were going to create a page or article
on brain power and how to improve it, which of the following
would be best?
improve brain power
improve brain function
increase brain power
increase iq
iq test
Now these aren't all searched by the same target audience
necessarily, but they are closely related terms. The first three
get about 2 searches daily as I write this. The keyword "increase
iq" has about 12 people searching for it daily - six times
as much potential traffic. But "iq test" has 2,400
searches daily, or a thousand times the traffic of the first
few choices.
Note: Though searchers for the latter are likely looking for
an actual test, they still might be interested in an article
titled, "The IQ Test - How to Score Higher." There
is often a way to tap into related niches in this way - but don't
do it deceptively. The title suggested here makes it clear that
they are not going to find an actual IQ test.
Of course, you may not be able to compete for traffic for
the keyword "iq test." More on that in a moment. In
any case, the "increase iq" searchers are certainly
looking for the kind of article you're planning to write, and
there are six times as many of these as "increase brain
power," so you can see that doing some research pays. Fortunately
there are tools for discovering how people search - specifically
how many times a keyword is searched each day or month..
I learned about keyword tools and research from my mistakes.
When I built my ultralight backpacking site (the-ultralight-site.com),
I made a page about dirtbagging (rough camping). Soon I was getting
half the world traffic for the search term "dirtbagging."
Unfortunately only about ten people search for that term each
month.
The obvious lesson is that you need to optimize your website
pages and your articles for keywords that enough people are using
when they search. How many is enough? That's not an easy question
to answer.
It used to be that I wouldn't use a keyword if there were
less than 300 searches per month for it. This was a somewhat
arbitrary number based on my experience and the nature of my
sites. But then my wife built a profitable site (in Spanish)
based on low-volume keywords, some that had only a few dozen
searches per month. Now I target almost any keyword with measurable
traffic (assuming it represents a topic I want to write about).
You have to experiment a bit, taking into account the value
of the type of traffic it will generate. For example, if there
were just 4 searches per month for a keyword like "large
diamond rings for sale," and I had a site selling such rings,
I would optimize a page and an article for that keyword. Such
searchers might be more valuable visitors, after all, than those
searching "cheap zirconia rings."
Also consider how easy a particular page or article is to
produce. If, for my travel site, I could throw together an article
like, "The Six Best Beaches," in twenty minutes, I
would do so even if the keyword was a bit weak, just because
the effort would be minimal. In other words, you are trying to
determine the return on the investment of your time.
To do this, you need to take into account the amount of potential
traffic, whether you can compete for that traffic (more on that
momentarily), the type of traffic (potential value), and how
much time it will take you to write the page or article. Once
you have looked at all these factors, you can make your best
guess as to whether targeting a particular keyword with an article
is worth your time.
Continues here... Keyword
Research Tools
Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money
Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters
on the home page.
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