Target these Keywords for More Traffic than You Can Handle

<< Step 1 - Introduction to Natural Backlinking <<

If you want a ton of traffic to your site then you need to read this to understand how important the keywords you choose to use really are.

This is the next logical step, after wrapping your mind around natural backlinking, that you will have to take in order to move toward your goal of massive amounts of traffic.

By the end of this article you will be able to easily select keywords that will help you achieve the kind of traffic you deserve.

How to Choose Your Keywords

When you randomly write you site's content, without even thinking about it, your site ends up being covered with keywords. And keywords are just important words or phrases that really sum up what your page is all about. Like if you were to have a site all about cheese, it would be kind of impossible to fill that site with content without saying cheese a few times, right? In fact, you'd probably talk about cheddar cheese or, my favorite, pepper jack cheese, which are more targeted keyword phrases.

But you're going to have a lot of competition if you try to target the keyword cheese or even the phrase cheddar cheese, because there are over 12.5 MILLION sites to compete with! So what you want to do is find keywords with low competition, that people use often when searching on search engines like Google. And these longer keyword phrases are going to benefit you in two ways: 1. You won't have to compete as much to rise to the top. 2. Your readers will know exactly what to expect when they get to your site. Like if you were to target the phrase cheddar cheese soup recipe you'd have a lot less competition (under 1.5 million) and people will know exactly what is on your page.

So how do you find the type of keyword phrases that are easy to end up on the first page of Google with? Well to start you use Google's Keyword Research Tool and type in a general term like cheese. Select "Exact" as the match type, one the left, and sort the results by local monthly searches and then look for a phrase that really targets what your site is about. Usually keyword phrases with 3 or more words are easier to rank for, but you want to make sure it still gets at least 1,000 searches a month.

You're choosing the exact match type because that will show you how many times people search Google with that EXACT phrase, in the exact order you see the words in; it's VERY accurate, when it comes to choosing a keyword. And you can sort your results by Global if know that your product, service or content is going to be beneficial and actually used by everyone around the world. Local searches refer to people just in your country, and a lot of the time what your offering will only catch the eyes of people in your own country.

And as a side note, if you're going to have AdSense ads on your page, then choose a keyword that has a high CPC (cost per click), because that means you'll get paid more. Why? Because the keywords on your page are what trigger the types of ads that show up and that CPC is the average amount advertisers pay to have their ads shown through that keyword.

But the magical keyword phrase that caught my eye is cougar gold cheese; it gets about 1,300 searches a month. So if you're going to sell this cheese or just want to talk about it, then search that in Google and see how many pages come up. 2.81 million competing pages... this doesn't really sound like a keyword you'd want to target, but go ahead and search it again and this time put it between quotation marks like "this". Now you see that there are only about 245,000 pages that really use that specific phrase, and it may not be one that they even really target that much. So you could easily rank high in the search engines with that keyword phrase!

Now the keyword phrase that you choose is going to be your target keyword, but you don't want to say that word or phrase in every single sentence. That's annoying and unnatural! Your readers won't like it and Google will see that you're trying too hard to rank for that keyword, and they might even punish you for it. So just write naturally and keep that keyword in mind. In fact, it's sometimes better to write your content and then come back afterward and add your keyword in where it fits. Put it in your title, sprinkle in the body text around every 100 words, use it as the name of one of your pictures and possibly have it in bold text somewhere on your page. Special font variants, like making it header text, bold, putting it between quotation marks and so on, makes Google think that it's a pretty important keyword.

And by having this keyword naturally show up your page, it doesn't annoy your reader and it looks pretty natural to Google, but you're going to use this keyword for another thing too. This is going to be the main keyword phrase that you use in anchor text when you get links back to your site. It's not going to be the only keyword phrase you use, we'll go over that more later, but it will be the one you most often use. And anchor text is just the text that is highlighted and clickable, like "Google's Keyword Research Tool" above. It's like when you point at something, someone might turn to look, but if you don't say anything they won't know what you're pointing at. But if you point and say, "Look at that dog riding a unicycle" then they'll know exactly what they're going to see when they turn their head.

This is how Google decides where you should rank in the search engine results for particular keywords and keyword phrases. The more people that point to your site (with a link) and say unicycle dog (in the anchor text) the higher you will rank in the search engine results for that keyword phrase. So keep this target keyword in mind while you're creating the content for your page, but you also want to hang onto it for the later steps, when we start getting backlinks. And hey, if you really want to know how easy it will be to rank for a keyword then I recommend you check out Micro Niche Finder and use their Strength of Competition tool; it's helped me land on page one of Google for competitive keywords before I even started getting backlinks. But let's move onto the next step.

>> Continue Reading Step 3 - Anchor Text Variety >>