SEO Training: Understanding Keywords

I use a service like http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ to research keywords and phrases around your client’s market experience. This overture listing gives you UK keywords searched for over the last month so it’s a pretty good resource.

In my opinion, its best to enter single keywords at first, giving your self an as complete overview of the market as possible. Also work laterally. Think about a wider appeal and pick related keywords not just the (usually crappy) list your clients give you. To help you with your lateral thinking use the Google sandbox keyword suggestion tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal . Although this tool doesn’t give you the numbers it (sometimes) acts as a thesaurus of sorts, and will suggest lateral keywords.

One thing you will have to remember is that Overture drops the 's' from words so you may think that "golf club" is the highest used search term whereas it may be that "golf clubs" is the actual one you should SEO for. Actually these keywords are a good example of something else that I will go into later. So in order to ensure that your plural/non plural term is accurate use the free Wordtracker tool http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com , which differentiates between plural and singular keywords. These tools work in the same way as overture but only for one engine (I think its Dogpile but don’t quote me on this) and the numbers shown depict daily traffic that is closer to the actual hits you will get from Google whereas the Overture results seem pretty inflated.

Once you’ve got a list of all possible keywords then its time to think 'long tail' - this means terms of over 4 words in length. long tail keywords are easier to SEO for and you get targeted results quickly without much effort so rather than trying to be #1 for "loan" which can take you years to achieve, be #1 for "bad credit mortgage loan" which should take a few days and will start converting right away.

To determine if what long term keywords are easily achievable simply type them into Google using quotes i.e. "your long term keyword" select local results i.e. "from UK only" and check that the following rough n ready guides apply:

The top sites listed don’t belong to large brand names (will usually show an internal page) – you just cant compete
There are few sites listed in total i.e. 1-10 of 2000 (not millions)
Sites on the first page don’t use the long term keyword at the beginning of their title tags

If these points are all ok then you can dominate these niches.