5. Working with Keywords

So far you have:

a) identified your niche and checked for profitability

b) carried out your keyword research at Wordtracker.

c) sent yourself your keyword research from Wordtracker.

Now, we are ready to start work on your keyword list.

How many keywords do you have in your list?

For any new site I build, I try to find at least 1000 phrases I can use (usually several times this). If you don’t have anywhere near that, you might like to go back to Wordtracker and do a little more (unless your have found a very small niche).

Just because I find 1000+ phrases, does not mean I will create 1000+ pages. These phrases are used in groups, to "theme" the webpages.

The website you build will use many of the keywords in your list on various pages of the site. Each page targeting different sets of keyword phrases.

5.1. So, Which Keywords Should You Target?

In order for your pages to be found at the search engines, they needs to rank well (top 10) for the actual phrases that people are typing in when they are searching. That is why you used Wordtracker last week to find out what people are typing into the search engines.

The best keywords to use to build your site, are those that are searched for a lot at the search engines (high demand), but have not been targeted by many other webmasters so have relatively few competing pages in the search engines (low supply).

5.1.1. Finding the Number of Competing Pages

Finding out how many competing pages a phrase has is simple. Go to Google, type in the phrase (in quotes), and see how many web pages are returned.

5.1.1.1. Why use Quotes for Determining Competition?

When I am trying to find out how much competition a phrase has, I search at Google by putting the phrase in quotes.

e.g "blue widgets"

Now this seems to confuse a few people, because I regularly get asked the following:

QUESTION: "Why do you search for competition figures using quotes when most people don’t use quotes in their searches?".

I also get this:

QUESTION: "Wordtracker says that the phrase "blue widgets" gets searched for 50 times a day at Google, and even though I am #1 on Google when I search for "blue widgets" (in quotes), I get no traffic. Why?"

Both of these questions are related. You need to understand when to search using quotes, when not to, and why.

Here is what I do:

1. Search with the phrase in quotes when looking to see how much competition a phrase has.

2. Search WITHOUT quotes when looking to see where a page ranks for a phrase.

OK, let’s look at why I do that.

When you conduct a search at Google, Google tries to match up the words in your search request with pages in its database.

RULE #1 – If you surround a phrase in quotes, Google will try to find the exact phrase in the web pages in its database.

e.g. If you type in:

"big bad blue widgets"

at Google, Google will look for pages that contain the exact phrase "big bad blue widgets".

Try it. You will see there are only a couple of results found for this phrase (both in an article I wrote on this topic). That is because no webmasters have targeted this phrase in their websites. I.e. the phrase has no direct competition.

RULE #2 – If you do not use quotes around a phrase, Google will try to find pages that contain the words in your search request.

e.g. If you type in:

big bad blue widgets

at Google, Google will look for pages that contain the following words:

big

bad

blue

widgets

but not necessarily in that order.

Try it. As you can see, there are 593,000 pages in Google that contain those words. Does that mean you have to compete with 593,000 other phrases for this term? Nope! It just means 593,000 pages in Google have all of the words that make up that phrase.

Despite not being optimized for this phrase, at the time of writing, Chip Tarver’s blog (where he reprinted my article) is number one in Google for this phrase.

So what have we learnt from that example?

Well, we know that apart from my article, there are no other webpages in Google’s database that contains the exact phrase "big bad blue widgets".

So how much competition does that phrase have?

I would say it does not have any competition other than the two pages relating to my article.

If you were to create a page with that phrase in it, your page will be one of only 3 in Google with the exact phrase, so surely Google would see your page as more relevant than the 593,000 others that just contain the words that make up the phrase.

This is the reason I search for competition using quotes around my phrases. It gives me an idea of how many web pages have been optimized for a phrase. We all now how important inbound link text is to the ranking of a page, but if the phrase is not on the page, there is a good chance it is not being targeted in inbound link text either.

In some competitive niches, you may still not rank at #1 for the phrase even if you are the only one in Google using the exact phrase, but you do at least have a good headstart in your optimizing strategy.

5.1.1.2. Searching for your Ranking Position

When searching for where your page ranks in Google, you obviously want to know the position your page will appear when the majority of people search for the phrase.

Very few people search for stuff using quotes, so neither should you when you are checking your rankings.

Fortunately you don’t need to do this for all your phrases, as Wordtracker calculated this for you.

It would be great if we could find keyword phrases that were searched for 1000+ times a day and had no competing pages in Google. Unfortunately the sad truth is that any keyword phrase that has 1000 searches a day, will already have been found, and targeted by hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of other webmasters.

In general, the more a phrase is searched for, the more competing pages it has in the search engines. No amount of on-page optimization (the words on your webpage) is going to get you a top 10 position in Google for a very competitive phrase. As you will find out later in this course, off-page factors are more important, and these take more work from you.

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