AffiliateSEO

In Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click Campaigns, the most important task you should focus on is the very foundation of optimization: keyword research.

The amount of time you devote on keywords list generation and how you conduct it says a lot about what and how you are as an SEO consultant.

It also says a lot about how your SEO campaigns are gonna end up and how stable your campaigns will be.

To make sure you don’t go the way of ’search engine optimizers’ who get the rankings for keyword phrases no one is actually searching for, here are some steps you may want to take note of:

1. Identify your website’s target niche.

What are your products? What are your services?
Which market do you want to capture?
Do you want to focus on a specific geographic location?

2. Identify your resources.

What information do you have on hand? Do you know the products and the services the current buyers prefer for this specific market? Do you know the query strings net surfers usually key in when searching for these products or services?

3. Identify your brand competitors.

Using what little information you have about the strongest brand competitors, do an online search of the products you and most of the consumers are interested in.

4. Identify your site competitors.

Google the keyword phrases you consider relevant to these products and services (based on your research). Take note of the sites that are coming up tops in the SERPs for these particular search strings. Take note how frequent some specific sites are appearing in the search engine ranking pages. We all can learn a thing or two on Search Engine Optimization from these sites.

5. Research, research, research!

Study the top sites. They’re up there for a reason and that reason for sure is, they are doing their search engine optimization campaigns well. Learn from these optimized-site topnotchers.
What are they using? are they using buttons or images? what are the keywords in their alt-tags?
Are they using text? What anchor texts do you see?
When you click on the links, do you land on a relevant page? is navigation difficult or do you immediately see what you are looking for?

6. Read it once, read it twice and yes, you’ll read it again… Content is and will still be king.

Check the content of the popular pages (the pages appearing on top of the search engine rankings).
Is the content interesting? What keyword phrases are predominant in the copy? How often have they been used? List these keywords.

7. Now for the real deal… Research validation.

After shortlisting the prevalent keyword sets, go to digitalpoint.com’s keyword suggestion tool page.

8. Prepare to set your metrics. Keep track of your keyword SERPs.

Type the shortlisted keywords and check how many users are searching for these keywords per day. Tabulate your SEO data.

9. Target highly-relevant, top-searched keywords.

When you already have the needed traffic data, rank the query strings accordingly. Sift thru the pile and determine which keywords drive high-volume traffic everyday, and which amongst those are highly relevant to your target niche.

10. Organize!

Group your final keywords list into categories. You will find out how handy categorizing them earlier would be when you proceed to content, image and landing page optimization. You will also need this for your directory listings and off-page optimization campaigns.

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