KeyWord Challenge

[MorbitlyObesePaypalAccoun]

How do you find a good keyword, I head that it should have less than 30,000 compet. websites (when typed in google with paranthe.) and more 10,000 searches a day.

When you target a keyword that has a little competition with paranthesis, are you only just hoping that people search with paranthesis? Because alot of people don't even know about that.

Also how do you guys build your website off of your keywords. Do you use 3 different closely related kw's or more? I get alot of conflicting advice about how many different ones to use.

[outwest]

Originally Posted by MorbitlyObesePaypalAccoun

How do you find a good keyword, I head that it should have less than 30,000 compet. websites (when typed in google with paranthe.) and more 10,000 searches a day.

When you target a keyword that has a little competition with paranthesis, are you only just hoping that people search with paranthesis? Because alot of people don't even know about that.

Also how do you guys build your website off of your keywords. Do you use 3 different closely related kw's or more? I get alot of conflicting advice about how many different ones to use.

Those methods are all a waste of time.
Do you have any kw search tools paid tools? or just free tools

[bubbins1987]

Hey,

I use market samurai for all my keyword research (sometimes I use the Google Keyword Tool as well).

These videos (the ones under "keyword research")
Noble Samurai - Dojo
Are great for beginners and I highly recommend that you watch them to get a full understanding of keywords and keyword research.

Hope that helps!

Thanks
Eleanor

[outwest]

Originally Posted by bubbins1987

Hey,

I use market samurai for all my keyword research (sometimes I use the Google Keyword Tool as well).

These videos (the ones under "keyword research")
Noble Samurai - Dojo
Are great for beginners and I highly recommend that you watch them to get a full understanding of keywords and keyword research.

Hope that helps!

Thanks
Eleanor

agreed
Newbies need to watch about 6 hours of kw research tutorials on either Market Samurai or other good tools

you cant learn kw research from asking questions in a forum you need to watch videos first on how to use the tools
it needs to be VISUAL in order for you to understand it how it looks to your eye, using the tools

thats the only way I learned
all Youtube vids
very easy to watch, if you dont like one guys style? click to the next one

btw I dont like Market Samurai's in house tutorials they have on youtube
I prefer to watch other people using it not that guy

Once you watch it you see oooh ahhhhh ok thats how you work that button, THATS what that means
etc
simple fun to watch

[MikeFriedman]

So 6 hours of video is the magic number?

That is a waste of about 5 hours.

There are 3 things you need to know about a keyword, and that is it. Everything else is just a bunch of white noise.

1) What is the search volume and is it a volume that can be profitable?

This of course depends on what you are selling or offering. If you have a bunch of AdSense ads earning 10 cents a click, you obviously are going to need a hell of a lot more traffic than someone selling a product making them $50 a sale that converts 1 out of 10 visitors.

2) Can I rank in the top 3 on the search engines.

It doesn't matter how many "competing pages" there are. Searching for something in quotes doesn't actually tell you who is optimizing their site for that term. That is a BS myth started by people selling SEO software and services.

Nearly all the traffic goes to the top 3 websites in a search. Obviously, the goal is to be #1, but nothing is guaranteed. I base all my decisions on the keyword being profitable if I only ever reach #3. If I can still make money at #3, I move forward.

What you need to do is analyze the quantity and quality of the backlinks the top 3 sites have. It is worth noting their onpage SEO factors as well, but you can generally match most of those with little effort, so that is not a big concern.

Your SEO skill level plays some part here too. Someone who has been doing this for a long time might look at a site's backlink profile and see it as easy to overcome, while someone brand new to internet marketing might look at the same profile and see it as nearly impossible to beat.

I would recommend SEO SpyGlass, Open Site Explorer, and/or MajesticSEO for this. Tools like Traffic Travis and Market Samurai are garbage for analyzing competition.

3) Is the keyword a "buying keyword"?

This one is sometimes very obvious and other times can be a little harder to analyze. It often takes some practice and experience. Ranking for "anal warts" may bring some sales, but if there is a solid search volume for "how to get rid of anal warts", the second one is probably going to bring you more sales. Those are people seeking a solution. The first one could be people just looking for information, writing a report, or who knows what else their motivation might be.

There you go. That is really all you need to know about choosing keywords.

[outwest]

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

So 6 hours of video is the magic number?

That is a waste of about 5 hours.

There are 3 things you need to know about a keyword, and that is it. Everything else is just a bunch of white noise.

1) What is the search volume and is it a volume that can be profitable?

This of course depends on what you are selling or offering. If you have a bunch of AdSense ads earning 10 cents a click, you obviously are going to need a hell of a lot more traffic than someone selling a product making them $50 a sale that converts 1 out of 10 visitors.

2) Can I rank in the top 3 on the search engines.

It doesn't matter how many "competing pages" there are. Searching for something in quotes doesn't actually tell you who is optimizing their site for that term. That is a BS myth started by people selling SEO software and services.

Nearly all the traffic goes to the top 3 websites in a search. Obviously, the goal is to be #1, but nothing is guaranteed. I base all my decisions on the keyword being profitable if I only ever reach #3. If I can still make money at #3, I move forward.

What you need to do is analyze the quantity and quality of the backlinks the top 3 sites have. It is worth noting their onpage SEO factors as well, but you can generally match most of those with little effort, so that is not a big concern.

Your SEO skill level plays some part here too. Someone who has been doing this for a long time might look at a site's backlink profile and see it as easy to overcome, while someone brand new to internet marketing might look at the same profile and see it as nearly impossible to beat.

I would recommend SEO SpyGlass, Open Site Explorer, and/or MajesticSEO for this. Tools like Traffic Travis and Market Samurai are garbage for analyzing competition.

3) Is the keyword a "buying keyword"?

This one is sometimes very obvious and other times can be a little harder to analyze. It often takes some practice and experience. Ranking for "anal warts" may bring some sales, but if there is a solid search volume for "how to get rid of anal warts", the second one is probably going to bring you more sales. Those are people seeking a solution. The first one could be people just looking for information, writing a report, or who knows what else their motivation might be.

There you go. That is really all you need to know about choosing keywords.

SeoSpyglass does that analyze the backlinks of 10 sites at a glance?
nope. Who wants to enter the urls one by one for backlinks?
who has time for that?

[TopKat22]

My basic rule of thumb for keywords is over 2500 searches and less than 25000 competition. However, I will bend those rules to 35000 or a bit more competition if a much higher number of searches (like 10,000).

What Mike Friedman said is good.

I would also just add, there are lots of other ways to get traffic other than SEO so search this forum for traffic generation and check out some of those other methods too.

[MikeFriedman]

Originally Posted by outwest

SeoSpyglass does that analyze the backlinks of 10 sites at a glance?
nope. Who wants to enter the urls one by one for backlinks?
who has time for that?

Market Samurai tells you nothing about the quality of the backlinks a website has. It tells you the number of backlinks at a glance. That's it. That is useless information.

So yeah, I'll take a little extra time to use something like SpyGlass on the top 3 sites.

And you don't have time to use SpyGlass, but plenty of time to watch 6 hours of videos?

[mkl3377]

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

Market Samurai tells you nothing about the quality of the backlinks a website has. It tells you the number of backlinks at a glance. That's it. That is useless information.

So yeah, I'll take a little extra time to use something like SpyGlass on the top 3 sites.

And you don't have time to use SpyGlass, but plenty of time to watch 6 hours of videos?

Actually MS gives you URL, and PR of the pages the backlinks are on and also give you the anchor text that was use. I've never used sypglass so I dont know if it gives you more info. For me, PR and anchor text and url is good enough. I dont like to overanalyze.

[MikeFriedman]

Originally Posted by mkl3377

Actually MS gives you URL, and PR of the pages the backlinks are on and also give you the anchor text that was use. I've never used sypglass so I dont know if it gives you more info. For me, PR and anchor text and url is good enough. I dont like to overanalyze.

That information is just skimming the surface. I can show you 10 PR 4 backlinks that are absolute garbage and 10 PR 4 backlinks that are golden.

MS does not tell you if those pages have 600 outgoing backlinks on them already. It does not tell you if the link still exists or has been removed. It does not give you a breakdown of the number of referring domains. It doesn't give you a breakdown of the age of the domains the links are coming from. It doesn't tell you the PR of the domain as well as the PR of the page.

Forget about SpyGlass even. Save the $100 for MS and use Open Site Explorer for free. OSE gives you better info than MS.

[outwest]

Originally Posted by mkl3377

Actually MS gives you URL, and PR of the pages the backlinks are on and also give you the anchor text that was use. I've never used sypglass so I dont know if it gives you more info. For me, PR and anchor text and url is good enough. I dont like to overanalyze.

ditto................

[outwest]

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

Market Samurai tells you nothing about the quality of the backlinks a website has. It tells you the number of backlinks at a glance. That's it. That is useless information.

So yeah, I'll take a little extra time to use something like SpyGlass on the top 3 sites.

And you don't have time to use SpyGlass, but plenty of time to watch 6 hours of videos?

cough who told you that?
MS has anchor text analysis and PR analysis of backlinks built in
or have you ever even used the software? I doubt it

Those features are in a pulldown menu if you left click the arrow next to the site listing in the top ten, be glad to show you how to use it or you can go to youtube and watch people using the feature

I certainly would not have paid 100 bucks for the software if it did not have the capability to analyze anchor text and PR of the backlinks, then yes it would truly be useless and certainly not worth paying for

So basically your assumption that MS doesnt analyze backlinks is totally false

[outwest]

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

That information is just skimming the surface. I can show you 10 PR 4 backlinks that are absolute garbage and 10 PR 4 backlinks that are golden.

MS does not tell you if those pages have 600 outgoing backlinks on them already. It does not tell you if the link still exists or has been removed. It does not give you a breakdown of the number of referring domains. It doesn't give you a breakdown of the age of the domains the links are coming from. It doesn't tell you the PR of the domain as well as the PR of the page.

Forget about SpyGlass even. Save the $100 for MS and use Open Site Explorer for free. OSE gives you better info than MS.

I thought OSE (yahoo isnt it?) was cancelled

Edit ok I guess its not yahoo
and it is working

who else uses this tool?

again I think that tool looks very useful but cannot analyze multiple sites at once backlink counts
which when you are going full bore analyzing 100s of kws per day just to get a fast rough idea of their backlinks to page and onpage SEO optimization................you need speed
You dont have time to enter urls one by one

now for indepth analysis of each site, the Site Explorer looks like one of your best choices plus its free

[MikeFriedman]

Originally Posted by outwest

cough who told you that?
MS has anchor text analysis and PR analysis of backlinks built in
or have you ever even used the software? I doubt it

Those features are in a pulldown menu if you left click the arrow next to the site listing in the top ten, be glad to show you how to use it or you can go to youtube and watch people using the feature

I certainly would not have paid 100 bucks for the software if it did not have the capability to analyze anchor text and PR of the backlinks, then yes it would truly be useless and certainly not worth paying for

So basically your assumption that MS doesnt analyze backlinks is totally false

Actually, I have used the software. Extensively. I've owned it since March of 2010. Took the trial before that, which I believe was 30 days. So yes, I'm well equipped to talk about the shortcomings of Market Samurai.

Yes, MS can pull the anchor text and pagerank of backlinks. I never disputed that. What I said was that MS tells you nothing about the strength of the backlinks a website has. Pagerank on its own is meaningless. A site that has a hundred PR 4 backlinks might look impressive in MS, but when you analyze with a different tool and see that each of those pages has over 600 outgoing backlinks, it does not look so impressive anymore.

The opposite can also be true. A site might only have a handful of high PR backlinks, but those pages might also only have 2-3 OBL each, which makes those backlinks a lot stronger.

MS also does not tell you if the backlink still exists. Just because it is indexed, doesn't mean it is still present. It could have been removed since the last visit by the search engine spiders.

MS tells you nothing about the age of the domain the backlink is on or the PR of the domain.

Just a backlink count, PR, and anchor text is only giving you about 10% of the story.

So, like I said, for $100, Market Samurai is a waste of money. Not to mention all the bugs it has, how slow it is, and that the rank tracking module is a complete POS.

[outwest]

never used the rank tracking module
When I have a huge list of `100s of kws I need a FAST way to look at the top 10 for each kws, quick give me backlinks to page, onpage SEO, factors, boom 30 secs on to the next one

then of course if you want to do INDEPTH backlink analysis
there are tools 100 times better than MS when you enter the urls one by one
Open site explorer is one, Seo Spyglass I guess is Ok but I have only used the free version
MS does serve its purpose for me though
its fast and gives me a snapshot of the top 10 then I can dig deeper later

SEO quake wont do that, wont give the onpage SEO factors, and I want to see all that in a glance I dont want to pull out a notebook and keep notes