SEO: Keyword research best practices

Global B2B buy sell website: http://www.bytrade.com

 

Keywords is a term that you hear all the time when it comes to SEO and Internet Marketing. In fact, it’s difficult to read something about SEO without keywords being mentioned. This blog post will help you understand why keywords & keyword research are so important to the popularity of your website.
                  
Simply put, keywords are the words that the search engines use to catalog, index and find your website. The idea is to find the most relevant and popular search terms that apply to your business and then make sure the content of your website are optimized for them

 What are the best practices of keyword research?

The first important factor in keyword research is to be thorough and methodical.  You may spend hundreds of hours writing killer content, back-linking, social networking and promoting your site based on the keyword research.  Therefore it is a good idea to make really sure those hours are not wasted.

♦   First: Understand the 3 Types of Keywords.

Keywords come in many shapes and sizes.  Let’s use this article as an example.  The term, “SEO” is a keyword in and of itself.  No “sane” person would try to target that as a keyword, though.  A quick check of Google shows 948,000,000 uses of that keyword.

KeyPhrases are the next step.  These are normally 2-5 words long.  This article uses, “Keyword research and SEO” .  This takes the nearly 1 billion articles of competition and pares it down to a cool 7 million.  Still too competitive.

Finally you get to long-tail keywords.  A long-tail keyword is a longer phrase (4-8 words long usually) that is desirable to rank for.  The volume of searches for these keywords is greatly decreased, but the chance of ranking for them on page #1 of Google is greatly increased.  A good longtail for this article might be, ”Best Keyword Research practices for Helium Articles”.  That phrase knocks the competition down from a billion to 400,000 articles.  –Still too competitive in many ways, but getting a lot closer on a very competitive area.