Stuff-Selling Entrepreneur>>Search engine optimization >>Choose the Keywords
The first step in SEO is generate a list with the keywords generator tool , the popular top keywords are also called niches as they are considered a market where people want the highest portion of it.
Every keyword is different, some are very popular and some are less visited. The same happens with the competence, some niches are very difficult to reach and some are relative easy. The perfect keywords list is these you can reach and obtain the maximum amount of traffic and the highest quality of that.
The Google Adwords Keyword Generator Tool
To determine wether a top keyword is popular or not, there is a free keywords generator tool called Google adwords keyword tool were you can see the statistics of a list of keywords, and i will show you how i use it to search top popular keywords for a web site aimed to help people to find a job.
As the words must be relevant with the content of the page and whatever I want to sell I will begin with the word 'job' and I obtain the following results from the keywords generator:
This is only the header of a long keywords list with a lot of green bars and words containing 'job'. a completely green bar means that this popular keyword has 100% of competence. The word job has more than 30 millions of monthly visits and everybody is competing for this niche. Other problem is that job is a general word, it can mean a man in the bible called job for example.
As I must recognise that the top keyword job is very difficult for me and i can find other words were I will can be the fist and receive more traffic than using the word 'job' i will use another related Keyword from the list: ''find a job''.
These are the results for this keyword in English in the United States:
The word find a job has also 100% of competence but there are other keywords in the list like 'find a job houston', with a 50% that will be relatively easier to reach. However, the words with less than a 100% of competence represent a too small niche, if I reach the first position of that word, I will only receive (2900x0,4)= 1160 visits a month.
I'm facing a problem withthe keywords generator tool: the keywords of the United States have a lot of competence compared with a list of Spanish top popular Keywords in Spain, for example. With the US market I will have to compete harder if I want some portion of the cake.
Affortunatelly, I know a trick for that kind of situations: A green bar does not mean 'impossible keyword' , the 100% of competence is according on the parameters of Google Adwords, and the natural indexation of Google, regards more details than this keyword tool .
I will make a more exhaustive analysis of the keyword to see if it is a keyword I can use. First of all, I search for the keyword ''find a job'', but knowing that there is a local redirect, in Spain, if I type google.com, I'm redirected to google.es, If I want to test the US market, I must type google.us. The following results, however, are the output from google.es and the conclusion about competence may be different than the correct approach for the US market.
The first place is the Yahoo!HotJobs, this sounds me like a hard competitor, but I will visit it to see if i can deal or not and I suspected. Only by checking the Google Toolbar of my navigator, I can see than has a Pagerank equal to 8. A site with a Pagerank higher than 5,means that is extremely difficult to outrank. My last hope is to be stronger than somebody else in the first five positions, otherwise I will have to look for another Keyword.
Afortunately in the second position there is a rival I can challenge, the page is a job site of an spanish local Administration, has no Pagerank because is a new page ( good signal). The main domain is http://www.asturias.es with PR=6 but pages under the domain use to have lower Pagerank than the index page.
A further analysis shows me that I'm right: In the navigator the is the option view>> source code. Here I can see if the Webmaster is good in SEO.
Somewhere between the tags < head> and </head> I find the Meta Tags, (If they weren't, still better for me). There are a lot of kinds of Meta tags, but the most important are the ''Keywords'' and the ''description'', they must be written under the title tag:
<title>My title with keywords there</title>
<meta name="Keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3,keyword4,keyword5" />
<meta name="description" content="My description with keywords" />
Maybe with this report, the webmaster will change their metas, but today, the title tag is written under the metas, and I do not find the word job or find a job, neither in the keywords nor in the description, this site is here because it's title begins by find a job, and the title is still more important than the metas.
Between the tags <body> and </body> I can still see that this page does not have any header, headers are phrases written between the tags <h1> and </h1>, <h2> and </h2> etc... the headers must contain keywords from the generator tool list. the same happens with the ''alt''' attributes of the images.
