If you want your webpage to benefit from free targeted search engine traffic, then you must have a good method for keyword selection.
Most people know that picking a keyword that gets a decent amount of traffic and is easy to rank for is critical. So, why do so many people struggle to get traffic?
The thing is that keyword selection is a tedious and time consuming task. Most people want to rush through it so they can get their site up and start getting traffic and making money.
The problem with that is that if you don’t take the time to do the proper research, you end up making mistakes … and those mistakes could mean that you end up targeting the wrong keyword which costs you both time and money.
Mistake #1
I used to make this mistake a lot myself and that is targeting keywords that don’t get enough traffic. Let’s face it, it’s not easy to find a keyword that gets lots of traffic and has little competition so the temptation is to go for the low hanging fruit.
I know a lot of people advocate this, but how low is low?
For me, if the keywords doesn’t get at least 2000 searches a month then it’s just not worth the time to write an article and get links to it. Even then you have to be sure that you will be able to claim the #1 spot (the difference in traffic between #1 and #2 can be huge).
Believe me, there is nothing more demoralizing than writing a killer article for your site and then submitting articles and doing social bookmarking to back link to it only to get 1 visitor a day!
Mistake #2
The second mistake has to do with your keyword selection and the root term that you use to ferret out keyword phrases. The problem is that most people don’t “go wide” enough. They stick to the main phrase and only get to see a limited amount of keywords for that niche.
What you should do is think about related phrases or targets and dig into the keywords below those phrases. For example, if you wanted to target “dog training” you could look at “dog obedience” or “german shepherd training” or even something like “stop dog jumping”.
Mistake #3
The final mistake that I see so many people make is perhaps the most critical and that is not evaluating the competition properly. You see, it’s not enough just to do the proper keyword selection; you must do the next step and evaluate the sites that are found for that keyword to see if you can get the coveted #1 spot.
Here’s where most people screw this up – they search for the keyword phrase in quotes and if there is a minimal amount of sites returned (a lot of people use 20,000, some use 10,00 etc…) then they give it the green light to be used.
While this might work to determine how many people are actively trying to target this phrase, it does nothing to tell you the strength of the competition and if you target phrases where the top 10 is very strong, then it will take you forever to rank on page 1.
What you need to do is do a search for the keyword phrase with out quotes. Then you need to evaluate the top 10 pages to see how strong they are. When you do this, you want to take the domain age, PR, number of back links and strength of those back links into consideration.
Proper keyword selection is critical for getting search engine traffic. If you’ve been having trouble getting traffic to your pages, then it could be that you are making one of these mistakes. Take the time now to evaluate your selection process and make the appropriate corrections. Taking the time to do research right in the first place will save you a lot of time later on.
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