SEO: Step 1 Keyword research (Continue)

Examples of good keywords selection practices

• Using your favorite keyword research tool Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or the Keywords Analyzer, type in the main keyword phrase. Start with the broadest possible search terms, this way there is less chance of missing keywords that might otherwise be overlooked.

• Look for 2-4 word key phrases that have at least a daily search volume of 200 or more. Since the top 3 sites will receive 60%-80% of all searches, it follows you can expect at least 120 or more unique visitors for those keywords phrases. In some cases, you may want to lower the minimum search volume threshold to as low as 50 if the search term is well targeted for your business.

• At this point you should have at least 20-30 really good secondary keywords in your basket.

• Hopefully most of the keywords you have selected will have little competition. Some of the keyword tools we have recommended will also tell you the amount of competition for each keyword, but you can also verify these numbers manually by typing the search terms into the search engines with quotes. 

• It's very important that you use quotes around the keywords to let the engines know you are looking for an exact match. The rule of thumb we use to assess keyword competitiveness is around "100,000" websites. Anything above a hundred thousand results is fairly competitive and requires a fair amount of optimization and link building.

Grouping keywords

• Managing and optimizing a large number of keywords can be a daunting challenge and it requires grouping for logical mapping to specific web pages once our initial keyword research is completed.

• Every website has at least 5-10 "main keywords" which can answer this question: "What is this website about?" The rest of the keywords are called secondary keyword and will be some variation of those main keywords whether lexically related or directly stemmed from the main keywords.

• Types of keywords

• Main keywords

• Usually one-two words in length, and all the other keywords either stem from them directly or are lexically related phrases, misspelled, or plural forms.

• A few examples of main keywords phrases are: "loan,""real estate,""lawyer," "DVD,""cell phone" etc.

• Although trying to get high ranking for these terms would be a futile attempt, nonetheless they are still required to be inserted into a website's title, body text and many other potential HTML tags for effective optimization.

• Secondary keywords

• These are the keyword we really try to get top ranking for on the search engines; therefore, they require the most amount of research and filtering. The secondary search phrases are either stemming from the main terms or semantically related in singular and plural forms.

• Usually 2-3 words in length, but they can be as long as 6 words in some cases.

• A few good examples of secondary keyword phrases are: "home equity loans," "low down payment loan mobile home," "best refinance home mortgage loan rate," "prepaid us sim cards," "international sim cards."

Long tail keywords

• If you had your choice of visitor traffic originating from the search engines, which scenario would your choose?

• One thousand visitors from one keyword?

• One thousands visitors from one thousand keywords?

• Targeting a few very popular keywords could bring to your site thousands of visitors a day, but at the same time you would be facing some very stiff competition. The more popular a keyword phrase is, the more optimization and link building effort is needed to achieve top ranking. So there is a trade off between choosing less competitive phrases with lower traffic vs. more popular keywords with higher difficulty levels to attain top ranking.

• Some SEOs prefer to target a few very popular keywords to get the greatest bulk of their traffic while others prefer to focus on many low competition keywords for an almost guaranteed top ranking. Also most SEOs recommend webmasters new to search engine optimization to target Long Tail keywords because it's easier to rank well in a short period of time.

• Long Tail keywords may be only searched a few times a month, but given a few hundred of these keywords, they can deliver a decent amount of highly targeted traffic.

• When you are just starting out it can be a great confidence booster to see the first few visitors trickle in from the search engines using Long Tail keywords.

• Long Tail phrases have a very tight focus, which makes them more targeted than highly popular broad keyword phrases and usually convert better. For example the keyword "golf shoes" might bring in thousands of visitors a day to a website specializing in golf shoes, but if someone searching for a specific brand and model like "men's air accel classic golf shoes" there is a higher chance of sale resulting from the search.

How do you discover Long Tail keyword phrases for your own site?

• Most of the mainstream keyword research tools such as the free Google external keyword tool, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Keywords Analyzer, and Wordze are a good place to start, but you also have to find some other not so obvious ways to search for Long Tail keywords.

• SEOdigger.com keyword spying tool is definitely a must have tool.

• Google suggest guess what your searching for and gives you suggestions in the form of an auto-complete search box. 

• When the user types a query into the search box the program saves the query in the database. This is a true gold mine of Long Tail keyword phrases.

• Zoom Site Indexer inexpensive MS Windows based site indexing and search tool.

Reference: http://www.trendmx.com/seo/step-1-keyword-research.aspx