Step by Step Guide To Keyword Targeting?

[Joe Pace]

I know there are experts in here at targeting keywords for SEO.

I was hoping these experts could take a few minutes to answer my questions below. I am using Wordpress on my site and want to publish about a dozen KW rich articles per week.

So with that in mind...

1. How do you know which keywords to target? I know you can use Google's KW tool... but how do you know which KW have low competition or are realistic to target?

2. What is the best way to setup WordPress when doing keyword targeting?

3. Once I have found a good keyword and published an article on my site using Wordpress, what should I do next? Bookmark it? Find a few good places to get backlinks? What is the process?

4. Since I am trying to target a dozen KW each week, what is the best approach?

If you can provide examples and as much details as possible, it would be very much appreciated.

[Suzanne Morrison]

Hi Joe,

Here is my opinion ...

1) I use a combination of the Google Adwords keyword tool and Wordtracker to find keywords. You can get an idea of the competition by:
- going to Google and typing in your keyword phrase with quotes and seeing how many competing pages there are
- typing in your keywords to Google and looking at the top competitiors (ie the sites in the first few spots on the first page of results). You can look at page rank or number of backlinks to get a rough idea of how hard it will be to beat them

2) I would recommend that you optimize each blog post for a separate keyword phrase. Put that keyword phrase in the blog post title and 2-3 times throughout the post itself. Also ensure that you have your permalinks set up correctly to include the blog post name in the URL rather than use the default setting which uses numbers and is not search engine friendly. You may also want to install something like All in One SEO pack to allow you to tweak the title & meta tags.

3) Bookmarking will help, but a lot of bookmarking sites give "nofollow" backlinks. Getting backlinks to the home page of your blog will also help (e.g. by article marketing, directory submission, forum marketing, blog commenting etc). You can also use some of these methods to get deep links directly to your blog posts e.g. submitting an article and putting your home page and a blog post page in the resource box.

I have a free SEO for Blogs series of posts on my blog that you may find helpful:
SEO for Blogs

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Suzanne

[aboutalhah]

I've created a step by step tutorial for beginners on my blog with screenshots, you'll find out how to find a niche, find the right keywords until you get the domain name for your site. You can follow it here: step by step keyword research tutorial

As for blogging, this is another story.

All the best,
Franck

[reikidad1961]

I tried my keyword with quotes and without quotes and got the same results. What is the benefit of using quotes?

[Wade Watson]

Note that she is referring to using quotes in a regular Google Search, not in the Google AdWords Tool. Quotes in a Google search require that the words be in that exact order. In the Adwords Tool, you can do Match Type > Exact to see exact searches there.

[aboutalhah]

I've created a step by step tutorial for beginners on my blog with screenshots, you'll find out how to find a niche, find the right keywords until you get the domain name for your site. You can follow it here: step by step keyword research tutorial

As for blogging, this is another story.

All the best,
Franck

[Suzanne Morrison]

Originally Posted by reikidad1961

I tried my keyword with quotes and without quotes and got the same results. What is the benefit of using quotes?

If you search in Google with quotes, this is known as Exact Match and will only return websites that have that exact phrase, with the words in that exact order.

For example if you search for Home Business Ideas without quotes this may return pages that have only "Home Based Business Ideas", "Home Internet Business Ideas" or "Legitimate Business Ideas at Home" because they include each of the individual words. However, if you search with quotes, these pages wouldn't show up because they do not contain the exact phrase "home business ideas".

Using quotes gives you a more accurate picture of your competition.

Cheers,
Suzanne

[Zeus66]

If you want a serious shortcut and you have about $100 to invest, one of the best pieces of software I've ever purchased for my online business (since 1996, mind you) is Micro Niche Finder. Search it at Clickbank or Google it. Very intuitive interface and about as newbie friendly (sorry if that's not you) as it gets. I'm happy to answer questions about it, if you need. And I'm not affiliated in any way with it, FYI. Just a happy customer.