Steve of Success Factors asked: what is the minimum volume you should consider in examining the keyword results, and what is too much volume (e.g., making for too much competition)?

A very good question because otherwise a keyword researcher can just go on and on with his research and come up with a million keywords. So probably the question here is when do we know when enough is enough?

There are 2 factors that you should consider:

1. How big is your site?

2. How much competition do you want?

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Keywords and Size of Site

If you are doing keyword research for a website that has thousands of pages, then a list of 50 or more keywords would be normal.

This is especially true with large corporations that have a gamut of products. General Electric is one and if the company is using keywords in its website, I would not be surprised if they are using at least a hundred keywords.

But if your website consists of only a dozen of pages, don’t aim for more than 10 keywords. For this size, I would suggest that you focus on 5 keywords at the most. More than that then your SEO would be muddled, your keyword focus would be lost with all the keywords you might be using.

Blogs can be quite different because a blog post can be optimized for one keyword. And that’s it. I don’t suggest using one or more than two different keywords in a single post because it would lessen the effect of both.

How Much Competition Do You Want for Your Keywords?

They say ranking success by aiming for a highly sought-for keyword is almost next to impossible. I agree and I’m sure any capable SEO expert (redundant? no,because there are some who just pretend to be one) would suggest that do not focus on popular keywords, rather focus on related keywords that have less competition.

Try making a Google search for ‘sex’ and you’ll find that there are currently 764,000,000 results. Millions! Good luck ranking for that keyword.

Now let’s try to find a better niche for a keyword. I tried ‘sex freelancer’ and it showed 634,000 results. Compared to ‘sex’ you’ll have much greater chances of ranking with ‘sex freelancer’. Why would anybody want to use that keyword is beyond me. We all have our own reasons and agenda.

They say the true mark of an artist is in knowing when to stop. Leonardo da Vinci knew he already had a masterpiece when he stopped adding paint on the “Mona Lisa”. The Beatles knew they already had enough “Na, na, na, na, na-na-na-na…” in “Hey Jude” when they ended the song or faded away for that matter.

Set your limits early on in your keyword research and use both common sense and gut feel to know when you already have enough keywords.

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Step-by-step Tutorial on Finding the Right Keywords to Optimize Your Site

This basic keyword research tutorial is the result of a suggestion made by The Lady Programmer. For this purpose, let’s pretend we have a freelance writer’s website. So obviously we want to find the right keywords starting with the keywords “freelance” and “writer”.

Why Google Keyword Tool?

I have 3 reasons why I’m using it for this tutorial:

1. It’s free!

2. I have used it at work.

3. It uses Google search results data. In short, it’s Google and more people are using it for their searches more than the other search engines.

Here’s the link to the tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Step 1: Collect the Seeds

Seeds are the main keywords or the general keywords that our website is known for. And for the sake of our example, our top seeds would be “freelance”, “writer” and a combination of both which is “freelance writing”.

From these seeds we are going to find other keywords to help optimize our website. One main reason behind this is because our seed terms are usually general terms and therefore we will find more competition in the search results. By finding more specific keywords, we can have better chances of ranking using those keywords.

Step 2: Expand Those Seeds

How do we do this? I have two ways to expand seeds. First thing I would usually do is to get a thesaurus and find the synonyms to those seeds. So for “freelance” and “writer”, I found these synonyms:

self-employed, non-staff, free agent, unaffiliated

author, editor, journalist, columnist, biographer, copywriter, freelancer, scribe, screenwriter, reporter, blogger

Second, I would find a competitor website and spy…err…I mean, find out what keywords he is using. If you do this, at least find a competitor with a better ranking than yours.

Step 3: Preparing to Use the Google Keyword Tool

Okay, first thing you will have to do is decide what country’s search results data do you want to know. What this means is, in your opinion, from what country do your site’s visitors usually come from?

Find the phrase “Results are tailored to English, United States” and click on Edit. Choose the language and country of your choice. But for this tutorial, we’re going to use English, United States.

Step 4: Type Your Seeds and Start Looking for Your Keywords

Type your main keywords one keyword or phrase per line. You might want to cover all possible related keywords so better include both the singular and plural forms of your keywords as well as the misspellings.

Leave the box for “Use synonyms” checked to help you expand your keyword research. But when you have seen the results and you find that there are a lot of unrelated keywords, repeat the process but this time do not check the box.

Your results will look like this:

Whew! It’s quite a list, isn’t it? And as you can see, I just cut the image so there are still a lot of results.

Now you will want to download these data to your Excel or OpenOffice Calc and sort them all out. To do this, go to the end of the results and click on .csv.

Step 5: Sort Out Your Search Results Data Using Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.Org Calc

Download the .csv file of your keyword research data and sort out data in any manner that you prefer. As for myself, I prefer to sort the data based on the Approximate Average Search Volume.

So that’s it! Now we have a fresh list of possible keywords that we can use to optimize our website. You can repeat the whole process with another set of seeds or main keywords so you can build on your previous data.

One thing that I want to point out is that a keyword research tool is still just a tool. It is up to you to form your own insight on the keyword data that you will gather and decide which keywords are the best ones for your needs.

As a rule, do not rely on just one tool. There are lots of other tools out there, both free and proprietary. You can use Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, SeoBook Keyword Suggestion Tool, and many others.

Good luck on your keyword research!

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Why the Anchor Text and the Keyword Should Go Together

First of all, what is an anchor text? The anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. Do I need to explain what a hyperlink is? I hope not.

An example of an anchor text and a hyperlink is this: my favorite place in the whole world!

The anchor text there is “my favorite place in the whole world!” and it is hyperlinked to another blog.

Now for the keyword. A keyword is the word or sometimes a group of words (usually referred to as a key phrase) that you want your website to be known for. Keywords are very important in search engine optimization (SEO) as these help your website to rank well in the search engines.

Perhaps the best example of the power of the anchor text is the key phrase “click here”.

Do you know what is at the number one spot for that key phrase when searched on Google? And take note that the search yielded more than a billion results!

It’s the page for downloading Adobe Reader.

Amazing, isn’t it? Most especially since the keywords “click here” are nowhere to be found on that

Adobe page.

The only explanation for that is the power of the anchor text.

The Adobe Reader is one of the most popular free software and also one of the most used because of the popularity of the PDF format. Websites that offer downloads of PDF documents and ebooks would usually place a link to the Adobe Reader’s download page so that people who still don’t have the software can easily get it and read the PDF file the websites were offering.

And I think you can guess what anchor text they usually use.

CLICK HERE

So what is the importance of the anchor text to your site? If you want your site to be known for a specifc keyword or set of keywords, it is important that you place your keywords in the anchor text that will be pointing to your site.

So if your keyword is “Sagada”, it is best to write your anchor text like this: …learn more about Sagada.

An extra point with that technique is not only did you make good use of the “Sagada” keyword, but you also included the keyphrase “learn more about Sagada”. So there is a greater possibility that if someone makes a Google search to try to learn more about Sagada, he might find that site in one of the search results.

In parting, always make an extra effort in using your anchor text especially if you are exchanging links with other site owners. Always ask them to make use of your desired keywords for the anchor text when they link back to you.

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IMBroadcast.com, the multimedia hub for Internet marketers is relatively new but it already has videos submitted by its members that can truly help us all who does business online.

I picked a couple of videos you might be interested in.

Here’s a short but informative video made by Darren Rowse when he asked probloggers Jeremy Schoemaker and Steve Pavlina for their blogging tips for first-time bloggers.

And here’s Aaron Wall and his tips on how to create Google and SEO-Friendly Page Titles.

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In every blogger’s life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else”s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that”s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need an easy to remember domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that”s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger”s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it”s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it”s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

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What’s the ideal keyword density for a 300-word article?

Is it 2% or more than that?

I say don’t worry about the percentage and just do the following and your copy will work just fine:

• Put your main keyword in your title. While it is not definite whether spiders start scanning a page from top to bottom or vice versa, it is the title that states what your article is all about. It is just natural to put your main keyword there.

• If you structure your article into three parts (introduction, body, conclusion), put your keyword once in the first paragraph, twice or thrice if possible in the body, and once in the last paragraph.

• Sometimes if you follow the keyword density percentage, your copy may look spammy or sound too unnatural. Although a good copywriter can effectively incorporate such a number of keywords into the copy, there will always be a limit to the amount of creativity that he can use.

• Know your keywords and build your article around it. Never forget to create a balance between the number of keywords and the general readability (by humans) of your article.

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After almost two weeks of waiting, my registration for the SEO Philippines forum was finally approved. Now I can post and not just look around the threads.

If you are new into SEO and would want to learn more about it, I suggest you join the forum. I already learned a handful just by browsing it.

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This would be my first SEO-related post and I think it would be best if I provide a list or link to a few great SEO ebooks/pdf files any beginner should start reading.

SEOPractices.com provided such a list. You should go check it out at their
Search Engine Optimization and Marketing Guides post.

Note: I am not an affiliate of that site. I just happen to like their list of resources.

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