Step 1: Keyword Research

Step 1: Keyword Research
Before ever doing any SEO, I always research which keywords I want to target. I’ll use a real world example that I currently hold the #1 ranking for in Yahoo and the #2 in MSN, so you can see how I did it. I’m still waiting on the results for Google, since Google takes so very, very long to rank a site these days. Besides, there are very good reasons for AdSense and YPN publishers to focus on Yahoo and MSN instead of Google in their SEO efforts. More on that in a little bit. I have a blog, when I created it I had to decide which keywords would get me the most traffic while not being too difficult to rank for, so I did the research at my favorite research tool, Digital Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool (it’s free): http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ I entered the term “cat” into the search box to see what I’d get.

As of the time of writing this tutorial, “cat picture” is getting 1,600 searches a day in Overture. It’s not in the Wordtracker list, but I’m rather more inclined to trust Overture’s search counts since Wordtracker relies on meta tag data and things that really have nothing to do with what people are actually searching for. I like to see the comparison, though, so I use Digital Point’s tool a lot. Keep in mind that Overture does not deal with plural keywords, it counts the
plural searches as singular searches. So I had to stop and think, would
people be searching for “cat picture” or “cat pictures” most of the time? In my mind, “cat pictures” seemed like the more natural search query, so I
decided to target that as my primary keyword for the blog.
Also keep in mind that the search counts you see are not the exact search
counts for the search engines. Sometimes the search engines get a lot more
queries than what you see, sometimes a lot less. What you’re more
interested in is how the keywords compare to each other in the list. If
“cat pictures” gets more searches than “feline pictures” according to
Overture, then chances are that “cat pictures” gets more searches than
“feline pictures” in the search engines, too.

The Value of a Keyword
In addition to knowing how many times a set of keywords was searched for,
it’s extremely important that you focus on the keywords that you know are
going to pay well. To research this I used my Keyword Explosion database.
As of the writing of this ebook, Keyword Explosion contains almost 2 and a
half million keywords and their AdWords CPC (cost per click) value, as well
as how many clicks they receive on a daily basis according to the AdWords
Traffic Estimator Tool. Very good stuff for deciding which keywords you
should build your site around if you want to make the most money per click.