There in no doubt that keyword research is the most important part of any internet home business. Most people just starting out in their first online business have no idea what to do or even – what is the order of the process? The first and the most important step is keyword research. That leads to the next question – How do I research my keywords for my internet home business?
The tool I use to find relevant keyword for my research is the Google external keyword tool. you can find the Google keyword tool by clicking on this link to Google Keyword Tool, or visiting the Google external keyword site. There are several options you can manually set in order to customize your search but I suggest using the default settings. Type in a very broad keyword phrase and narrow them down by selecting ten to twenty of the most relevant results. It is a good practice to choose the most relevant keywords from your first search and do individual searches on them. this process will help to uncover more relevant keywords. A good keyword choices have a local search volume no less than twenty four hundred monthly searches, and have medium to low competition levels.
Finding relevant keywords are just the tip of the iceberg. You must now investigate the level of competition for each keyword. Save your keywords to a text file of a csv. file so you can individually evaluate each term using Google search to find competition levels. Here are some Google operations to use in the Google search box to get the desired data you are seeking. The data we are interested in is the exact keyword, and the anchor text results.
SEARCH OPERATION |
OPERATION DEFINITION |
| allinanchor: “keyword” | - All words must appear in anchor text of links to a web page. |
| allinurl: “keyword” | - All search words must appear in the URL. |
| allintext: “keyword” | - All search words must appear in the text of the web page. |
| allintitle: “keyword” | - All search words must appear in the title of the web page. |
| “keyword” | - All search words must appear in exact phrase on web page. |
The related data you will be looking for appears directly below the search box and is formatted as follows: “About 1,590 results (0.34 seconds)”. The data we are most interested is the number of results returned by keywords surrounded by quotation marks. The desired amount is preferably around 30,000 results is a good keyword phrase. Any of your keywords that do not fall within these parameters should be eliminated.
The next step is to evaluate the commercial potential of your remaining keywords. commercial potential measures the commercial potential of a particular keyword. A lot of SEO’s type the keyword in the Google search box and and check to see if there are any sponsored ads in the results. The logic being if people are paying Google to for ads on that particular keyword phrase then there must be money in that niche.
The next step is to figure out how strong is the competition for a particular keyword phrase. For this I like to go to Google and do a search on each keyword phrase. I usually check the top ten results by opening another tab in my browser so I can tab back and forth. In the the new tab go to Yahoo Site Explorer this is a really cool free online tool that can help you see how many pages the competitive site has and even more relevant how many Incoming links just paste in the sites URL and click explore, and you will be able to see just how much backlinks a website has. Obviously if a site has hundreds of pages and thousands of backlinks from high Page Rank sites then they will be difficult to beat.
To see the Page Rank of a website you can install the Google’s tool bar in your browser and check a websites Page Rank. We are looking for sites with a page rank of three or less. Repeat this process for each remaining keyword and eliminate the ones that are too competitive until you are left with your golden keywords. The keywords with good search volume, acceptable levels of competition, & good commercial value are considered golden.
There is a possibility of eliminating all your keywords because none of them fit into your keyword criteria we are looking for. In these circumstances you must start the process over again using the Google External Keyword Tool to identify some new keywords. Remember without good keywords to begin the website building process you could waste many months of hard work without anything to show for it.
Summary
Use the Google External Keyword Tool to find relevant keywords with a monthly search volume of a least 2400, and med to low competition levels.
In the Google Search box type the exact keyword in parentheses to find the number of times the exact phrase appears on the internet then eliminate the ones with results more than 30,000.
Check your remaining keywords for commercial value you can check the search results to see how many AdSense ads are being ran for that keyword.
Type each of the top ten search results for a keyword phrase into the Yahoo Site Explorer to check for the amount of backlinks of each website in the top ten search results for that keyword.
Visit the top ten search results for a keyword phrase check the page rank of each of the top ten websites. page rank of 3 or less are a good indication.
- Good manual keyword research could take many hours of diligence and hard work but the payoff is well worth it. The manual process requires a lot of time, but when just starting out and you don’t have a lot of money to invest this is the way to go. If you would like to use the Easy Button I recommend using the Micro Niche Finder Key word research tool. I myself have purchased several keyword tools but once I discovered the Micro Niche Finder there was no need for any other keyword tool.
