Importance of Research
If you’re going to carry out any campaign, research is critical to its success. What this implies is that you must know how to research your audience and your keywords, and also have a clear idea of what your corresponding niche is. Only then are you going to experience much more success and efficiency within your niche business.
Let the writing find the niche
However the piece of advice to give newbies is not to worry to excess about a niche. Instead, when you begin to write your pages to build up your website, simply empty your head and just write. Your niche will no doubt show through the way a rough diamond shines when polished.
This is because as you keep writing, two things will surface. The first is what you are truly passionate about, and the second will be for you to decide if you can muster the courage to stick with this “passionate but seemingly daunting task” over the long-term.
Difficulties you may face
Even little matters will test your courage. For example, you may be faced with how to get something right with the use of a keyword.
Say, if you do a search for the long tail keyword like “How to make money online from home,” and the Google keyword tool shows you that there are a certain number of good monthly searches and not many competing sites, then it is good to use, right?
Also, when you begin to write your content, do you have to use the whole phrase “How to make money online from home” or could you just use the individual words in the phrase? For example, if you were to use ‘money’ on its own within a different phrase, how do you know that money is a keyword on its own?
Possible answers
Sure, if the Google tool displays a good number of searches for your term and less competing sites, then you have a gold mine.
In effect, when you do a search for a one-word keyword or for a long tail keyword (the keyword phrase or the one containing more than one word), the keyword tool will return the results for the exact word or words you entered to search for. As the term “How to make money online from home” is a keyword phrase, the keyword tool will look for all exact matches to that specific term. If you decide to write an article about “How to make money online from home”, you have to use all the words exactly as you entered them, that is, in that word order, so that the search engines can rank your article for that term.
Which is more important? Site title or domain name?
Another thing you may have to worry about is: what counts more as keywords, the title of your site or the name of your domain?
Both the title of your site and the name of your domain should ideally be based on keywords. You would want to be rank for both so that you can easily be found, wouldn’t you?
The other side of the question is, you are about to write an article titled “How to make money online from home”, and if beside that phrase, you could also include individual keywords like “money”? Maybe a related question could be, do you search the individual keywords by entering them as single words? You may also be worrying about the fact that researching, and especially, using single keywords are not always going to bring up the result that you hope for. So how do you do your search?
The truth is that the keyword phrase “How to make money online from home” contains several keywords. There is “How to”, “make money”, “money”, “make money online”, “make money online from home”, and even the long tail keyword itself “How to make money online from home”.
So SEO wise, you could literally get ranked six times for that one keyword term, because of the combinations of all the keywords in that one phrase.
But for each keyword in that phrase to serve your SEO purposes, you must search each.
You could first search your long-tail keyword phrase and copy down the matches which will bring in good traffic but at the same time have little competition. Idem for the short tail and single word keyword phrases. Finally you will end up with a certain number of high converting keywords for your article.
But a word of caution is necessary here. Do not stuff your article with keywords nor with awkward ones. Google will punish you for that. Your keywords must fit in perfectly with the general flow of your article. Know that at the end you’re writing for a human reader and not for the search engine robot.
