There are millions of websites across the world and they are all trying to get visitors to their website. One way to get website traffic is with keywords. If you don’t know what a keyword is, you’re not alone. Many business owners create websites with a limited knowledge of internet marketing and they make decisions that they aren’t even aware of.
WHAT IS A KEYWORD?
A keyword, or keyword phrase, is a word, or words, that people type into search engines to find information, products, or services. If you want to get a pizza in New York, you might type in something like “Best pizza in New York.” That’s a keyword phrase. If you own a pizza place in New York, you want your place to be at the top of the list when someone types that into a search engine.
HOW TO FIND GOOD KEYWORDS
If you own a website, you want to find good phrases to use for your product or service. The good ones connect the buyers and the sellers. The key to finding a good phrase is to identify the ones that get significant traffic from your target market and are not too competitive. Some are so profitable that major businesses spend thousands of dollars to get to the top of search results. If your website is a one-man operation, it might be hard to compete against those resources.
THE GOOGLE KEYWORD TOOL
When it comes to keywords, you don’t have to guess which ones get good traffic. Google, the largest of the search engines, provides a tool that anyone can use, for free, to find the best. If you’re not sure whether to use “car parts,” or “auto parts” for your website, go to the Google Keyword Tool and you can find the answer.
KEYWORD COMPETITION
There is no guaranteed way to find low competition words that would be easy to rank for. People use different techniques to gauge the competition. One of the more popular methods is to type the words into Google with quotes around the phrase.
When you run a search in Google with quotes, it gives you the results for websites that contain that phrase. Some people will decide that if there are less than 50,000 websites containing that phrase, it is a good keyword. Some people might say less than 50,000, or 5,000, it depends on the business model and the amount of work you’re willing to put in to get the results you want.
Internet marketers also look at the PageRank of the top webpages, as well as the number of backlinks they have. PageRank is a number assigned by Google, between 0 – 10, that indicates the strength of that webpage. You can determine the PageRank of the search results with free internet marketing tools, such as the Google toolbar, or SEO for Firefox at SEO Book.
If you use the PageRank to determine competition, look for low numbers. The lower the number, the lower the strength of the website, according to Google. If you type in your keyword phrase and the top 5 search results contain webpages with PageRank 5, 6, 6, 7 and 4, it will take a lot of work to beat those webpages in the search results.
Most people consider webpages with PageRank of 2 or less to be low competition, depending on how hard you’re willing to work to get to the first page of search results. However, PageRank is only one factor that Google takes into consideration when returning search results. A PageRank 2 website can show up ahead of a PageRank 5 website if it’s better optimized for that specific query.
