I think you already know the fact that without traffic you won’t make any money. One of the best strategy to drive free traffic to your web site is by creating content and submitting it to article directories, Squidoo, HubPages and so on. But first, we need to write some articles which would be optimized for specific keywords, which have low competition, so it would be much easier for our articles to rank well in the search engines. In other words, we need to do professional keyword research. In this keyword research guide I will show you how to do it.
To do a professional keyword research, I use a software called Market Samurai. This software has full free research tool, which I believe is the best in the world.
Here is how to get your keywords using this free software:
1) I type the main keyword (for example, I choose “recipe”) and click “search”. Market Samurai gives me a huge list (up to 800) of related keywords and the number of daily searches for this term. There are also other additional functions, but you don’t really need them. It just makes the research more complicated. For a professional keyword research you need only these two results.
2) Then I sort my results by clicking on SEOC (this will rank your results by the number of competing pages)
3) If you are a beginner you want really low competition (pick up exact phrase which has lower than 35,000 competing pages. Later on you can make it lower than 100,000), high daily search number (15 is the bottom) and high quality keyword (related to your product and without word “free” or something like that). You will find these 3 main things in almost every keyword research guide.
During my own professional keyword research I usually pick up 10-20 keywords and save them to text file. When I use a keyword, I make it bold or something like that, so I don’t use the same keywords several times.
Important note: (If you will ignore this tip, most of the time you won’t do a professional keyword research and your articles won’t rank high in the search engines, what means this keyword research guide won’t give you any benefits) if you want to find a really good keyword, then pick up any new term from your keyword list with high search volume and make it your new main keyword! This will make your competition even lower. I apply this tip every time to my research when I find some keywords which have big daily search number.
However, to do a professional keyword research, you need to do some other things that usually people don’t talk about. In this keyword research guide I will show you one big secret how to check out the real competition.
For this task, you will need to use Firefox browser and install SEO Firefox plugin (Google it and the first result will be that plugin).
Since you installed that plugin, search your every selected keyword. You will see that this plugin will give some extra information. You will see how old the domains are, how many backlinks they have, how many backlinks to specific page there are, Google PG (if it is higher than 4 it may be hard to rank for that keyword) and how many people bookmarked that page with Digg, Delicious, Twitter. That’s how you do a really professional keyword research.
I hope you found some value in this keyword research guide. I shared several secrets that people never talk about (but these secrets are vital for a professional keyword research!).
