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The Wrong Keywords Can Sabotage Traffic Efforts

By Jobo Smith

Probably the single biggest factor to driving traffic to your website, blog, or forum is your choice of keywords. I, like many others, fought this concept for a very long time. I had some very successful people tell me "Its all in keyword selection," but I would not listen. I did not want to spend the time learning to do it right, and learned a very bad habit: Brute force. Yep - where planning left off, pure brute force would work. I learned I could take almost any keyword phrase and with enough effort and articles, get ranked for it. I would write dozens of articles on a keyword, including spending hours creating massive spinnable versions of them for huge distribution. Boy was this dumb, but since I was getting success from it, it encouraged me to go at it again and again.

At some point, a bell went off in my head. Here I was spending months and months trying to rank for crazy competitive keywords, but the end result was not what I wanted. Sure, I would get ranked, but since I never put any planning into my efforts in the beginning, the result was disappointing. I wanted traffic - and I got it - but the traffic did not convert or generate the income I anticipated. This is all because I was really dumb in the beginning, and just jumped in with no plan. It's not like the time was all wasted, but looking back I can see now that instead of 2 or 3 hard keywords, I should have done my research and ranked for 20 or 30 minor, but focused keywords.

And this is what success is all about. It does you no good if you are selling widgets to get 10,000 visitors to your site who are looking for woozles. Sure a few might convert over and buy one of your woozles, or perhaps click an affiliate link of yours. But overall, the effort is wasted. You have a site with huge traffic but its not worth much.

The key is to define an exact goal in the beginning. You can have more than one goal, but in the beginning you should have 1 goal. It should be in the phrase "I want a visitor to X." It is easy to get side tracked, and think you can work on multiple goals at the same time - believe be its not really that easy. Pick 1 and then concentrate all your efforts on it. Once you have your goal outlined, put yourself in the customer or visitors shoes. If you were searching for information on X, what is the exact thing you would type into the search engine. Be as exact as possible and make a list of these. You want at least 5 to 10 at a minimum, and another 5 to 10 which are ancillary, or related.

From here, you need a keyword tool to help you. Google has an ok one that is free. I personally swear by Market Samurai and believe hands down the information it gives will not only save you hours of time, it will dramatically increase your success rate. So you then take this list of keyword phrases and put them into the research tool. You want to know traffic and search patterns for each, and at the same time use these words to expand your list by using the tools to scour search terms.

Market Samurai has a column that shows SEO competition and ranks it from 0% to 100%. Any decent terms that get a less than 5% ranking for competition are on my further research list. I additionally only look for stuff that gets at least 40-50 searches a day, or about 1500 per month. I do not go beyond about 100 per day, or 3000 per month. This keeps the terms in a reasonable zone to rank for most of the time. Remember, you are going to rank for many terms and it is the cumulative effect of many terms that will really ramp your traffic up. I, like many others, used to believe the myth that if I could get ranked for a 10,000 a day search term all my worries would be over. Well, perhaps they might, but you waste a year of time trying to get there with very little traffic or anything else to show for your constant efforts. The opportunity cost is just too high - leave that for much later on.

Once I have narrowed down my list, I then start punching the terms into Google. I have an addon installed called SEO Quake. Its totally free and if you are doing anything on the internet you should install it. Basically it will do a quick SEO analysis of any webpage you have up, and in addition, all webpages that show up in a Google search. I am looking for keywords that have low PR (page rank) sites in the top 5 (3 or lower), and/or the websites ranking are new (within a year). The more of the top ten that is articles or something like hubpages or squidoo the better. Those are easy to rank with, but also easy timber to knock down with a dedicated site.

When all is said and done, I want 3 or 4 keywords to work on in the beginning. The goal is to get those ranked in the top 15 or top 10, then move on to more keywords which might be tailored to a different goal. It becomes rinse and repeat. The hardest thing for me was to realize what others were telling me worked and to really "hear" it rather than brush it off and think I knew better. Once I started planning out my keywords and goals, it actually became much easier to drive traffic and get ranked.

Contributor's Note

If you would like to know more about Market Samurai or other tools I use, feel free to contact me.

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Thank you for sharing this valuable information, Jobo.
I purchased Market Samurai about a year ago thru the 30 Day Challenge. Due to time and money, I couldn't finish the course. I think that I have Market Samurai and will try to get my old head around it. I know that we need to do a better job with our keywords on our website.
Keep up the good work.
Best wishes.
Frederick

They have a ton of training now up on their site. It really is a quite valuable tool if you listen to what it is telling you. With correct use you not only get much better keywords, you really spend far less time getting ranked. This gives much needed time to work on other stuff.

Thanks so much. I learned a lot from you. I'm using SEO Quake and will look into Market Samurai.

Thanks for the kind words. If you would like a discount on Market Samurai, contact me.

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