If you’re planning your first SEO campaign or even starting again because your site isn’t attracting the right kind of traffic then the most important step you can take before you do anything else is to make sure you’ve done some well thought out and well managed keyword research. Get it wrong, by targeting the wrong keywords (or the expensive ones) for your niche and you’ll find yourself collecting high ranking but meaningless search terms. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing keyword research for SEO, PPC or a finely tuned combination of the two, if you choose the wrong keywords you’ll be wasting both your money and your time.
This article will show you how to both research and then choose the optimum keywords for your website and for your overall marketing strategy. There are numerous tools out there that you can find and use to help you choose those keywords, some of the paid for, some free, but before you look into those tools, take twenty minutes to do one little thing. Take a paper and pen and give yourself half an hour to sit and write down all the phrases and keywords that you would most likely use if you were searching for a site that is similar to yours. Then repeat the same step for one of your competitor’s sites. After you’ve done this, try one further thing that most people don’t do. Rather than collecting data just from your own habits or even the habits of your peers who will probably be just as tech savvy as you are, ask your parents or grandparents if they would sit down and search for a site like hers. Write down the exact phrases and terms that they use and you’ll soon have a far more exhaustive and wider set of results. [Read more…] about How to Find the Perfect Keywords Every Time