Isins Network

To review the following are the six steps are listed below and now we will cover the third (Befriending the keyword research tool). As a reminder the six steps are listed below with strikes through the ones already done.

The six steps are;

1. Demolishing Misconceptions
2. Creating the list and checking it twice
3. Befriending the keyword research tool
4. Finalizing your list
5. Plan your Attack
6. Rinse, Wash Repeat

Befriend the keyword research tool

Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to try to narrow your list to only include feasible, popular phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site.

In the early days of SEO, measuring the “popularity” of your search terms was done by performing a search for that phrase in one of the various engines and seeing how many results it turned up. Imagine, how tedious and what an ineffective method of keyword research. Times have changed and we now have tools to do the hard part for us.

You can quickly learn how many users are conducting searches for certain terms every day. Input your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool and see how many of those searches actually converted, and other important analytical information. This may also tune you in to words you had previously forgotten or synonyms you weren’t aware of.

There are lots of great tools out there to help you determine how much activity your keywords are receiving.

Here are just a few:

Overture Keyword Selector tool
Wordtracker
Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool
Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Google Suggest
Thesaurus.com
Check Traffic tool

You are not only checking to see if a good amount of people are searching for a particular word, you’re also trying to determine how competitive that phrase is in terms of rankings.

Understanding your competition tells you how much effort is need to investigate to rank well for that term. There are two questions to ask when making this decision:

- How many other sites are competing for the same word, how strong are those sites’ rankings (how many pages do they have indexed how many other sites link to them?)

- Is that word or phrase worth your time? If it’s not, move on to something else.

When testing your new terms, you may want to keep an eye out and test the activity for keywords your site is already targeting. Keep the ones that are converting and throw out the garbage.