Choosing the right key phrase to target

0

Share

When choosing a key phrase to make a website for, you want to find one that gets a decent amount of searches and has a site ranked in 1st place that you can beat. In this article I will tell you how I go about choosing a key phrase to optimize for.

Step 1:

First I go to the keyword suggestion tool (Google it and you'll find it) which lets me enter a key phrase and then tells me how many people search for it each day on Overture. I would start with a key phrase that is in a niche that you can optimize for easily. For example, if I know of a lot of sites related to tables that I can exchange links with or I already have a few sites related to tables that I can link to the new site from, then it would be a good idea to choose a key phrase related to tables. If the keyword suggestion tool says that a key phrase you entered gets more than 1000 searches a day and you think you might want to optimize for it, then it is time to move to step 2.

Step 2:

Now that I have a key phrase in mind, I want to find out how tough the competition for it is. To do this, I do a Google search for the phrase and check out the top 10 ranked sites for it. If any of the sites in the top 10 have a Google Page Rank over 5, then you will probably want to go back to step 1 and choose a different phrase to optimize for since it will take quite a bit of time to rank for this phrase. You can check a site's PR with the Google toolbar. If the site's ranking on the first page in Google all have PR5 or below, then I move on to step 3.

Step 3:

Now I want to find out how well their site is optimized so I go to Yahoo to find out how many links they have. I use Yahoo for this because Google doesn't display all links. In yahoo, do a search for "link:http://www.urlhere.com". Remove the quotes and replace "urlhere" with the URL of the site that ranks #1 for the phrase that you want to target. If you think you can get more links to your site than this site has, then this is the right phrase for you! If you don't think you can get enough links to beat this site, then it's time to go back to step 1 and find a new phrase.

Why is it important to choose the right key phrase?

If you choose a phrase that is too competitive, the search engine optimization process will be very long and you probably want your site to start getting search engine traffic as soon as possible. Most single word key phrases such as "cheats", "games", "hosting", "Survivor", "articles", "riddles", "TV", "proxy", "dictionary" etc. are pretty competitive so you usually want to optimize for a phrase that is two or more words if you want to see results in a decent amount of time. There are also many competitive two-word phrases like "real estate", "web design", "Photoshop tutorials", "word searches", "free smileys", etc. which is why it is important to go through these 3 steps - that way you won't end up trying to optimize for a very competitive two word phrase that you won't show up in the results for any time soon.

These steps don't work 100% of the time, but they almost do. Sometimes a phrase will have hardly any competition, then suddenly it is in the news the next day and you have to compete with a bunch big news sites. Fortunately, this doesn't happen often. For one example of this, the phrase v7ndotcom elursrebmem had no competition on January 14th, 2006, then the next day it had a ton.