Find The Cash Sucking Keywords That Will Bring You Loads Of Targeted Traffic! – PART 2
If you are just arriving here, this post is part of a series of posts where I show you, step-by-step, what I do to put together a profitable campaign. To start at the beginning, GO HERE.
OK, whew, that last post was a long one, and this one is kind of long too. But keyword research is soooo important to get right. It literally means the difference between making money or spending hours and hours making content that never gets looked at, which means all of your work will be wasted.
So, we have our spreadsheet with 10-20-30-however many keywords. If you find lots of good ones from the previous steps, great, use them. If you only have 5 or so though, go back and find more. Our goal here is to further narrow down our list to 5-10 keywords we will initially target.
I like to find 10 total, but then pick 5 to target. Once I saturate those 5, I evaluate and move on to the other 5, etc.
The first thing we need to do is fill in the columns we did in the previous steps with what we find out from Google. These steps explain how to do it for one keyword. Just go back through the steps for each keyword. Here’s what we do:
1. First do a search in Google with quotes around your search term. So, if I were searching for “jamorama review” I would type “jamorama review” into the search box with the quotes. Easy enough, huh? Make note of the total search results and enter that number in your “Quotes” column next to that keyword.
IMPORTANT**This is where most aspiring IM’ers make a major blunder – they are taught to only go after keywords with 5,000 or less results with a quote search. So, if they get more than 5,000 in this Step, they automatically discard the keyword as too competitive. Read on to Step 2 to see why they are WRONG…
2. Next, read THIS POST first on how Google lies to us. Hopefully after reading that post this makes sense, but basically you want to scroll all the way down to the bottom of page 1 of the search results from the search in Step 1.
At the bottom of the page, google lists out the results as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. Click on the 10 to go to the 10th page of search results.
Do this over and over until you get to the last search result. You’ll be surprised to find that the last search result is much lower than what you found in Step 1.
Make note of the total search results after reaching the end and put this amount in the “Revised Quotes” column.
3. Next, we want to go back to the Google search box and type the keyphrase in as follows (using the Jamorama review example):
intitle:”jamorama review”
This will tell us how many pages have our keyphrase in the title.
BUT…
after you do this search, do what you did in Step 2 again (go to the very end of the search results). Record this result in the “Intitle” column.
4. This step is exactly the same as Step 3, except you want to type into the Search box the following:
intitle:”jamorama review” inanchor:”jamorama review”
Notice there is no space between the : and “, but there is a space between ” and inanchor. Again, this tells us how many pages are specifically optimizing for our keyphrase by putting it in the title and anchor text. Go to the end of the results and record what you find in the “Intitle/”Inanchor” column.
Now, let’s pause for a moment so I can explain something.
Ultimately, we should only be concerned with how strong the 1st 10 results are in Google when doing a normal search (ie without quotes or operators) because this is where we are trying to rank. So, are the above not important?
I have heard some say that Steps 1-4 don’t even matter because we should only be concerned with the first page results BUT, I like to look at both the results in Steps 1-4 and the Steps I outline next. This is because if I find that the 1st page results are weak competitors, but there are 300 pages optimized for my keyword, I may still have a tough time ranking. As a result, I like to look at a combination of the above Steps with the following Steps.
Ultimately, you have to do what you are comfortable with, this is simply
the way I do it and what has worked for me.
OK, on to Step 5:
5. In this Step, we are focusing ONLY on the 1st page results. So, first you want to do a search in Google for your keyword without quotes or operators – just a plain old Google search.
We are looking at the Page Rank of each of the results on the 1st page. If you are not familiar with Page Rank, it is basically how important, on a scale of 1-10, that Google thinks a website is. The higher the page rank, the more important in Googles eyes. You can read more about Page Rank HERE.
So, how do you determine each pages page rank? Well, in the previous post I mentioned SEObook.com. We want to go back there and download their SEOToolbar. You can find it at http://tools.seobook.com/
Once you download this, you will have a Page Rank bar in your toolbar. So, every time you go to a page, it will tell you automatically what the page rank for that page is.
So we want to go to each page in the top 10 results and write down what the page rank is for that site. When we get all of these, we add them up and divide by 10. This gives us the average page rank for our keyphrase.
ONE IMPORTANT THING**do not add into the results any results such as Ezinearticles, Goarticles, Articlesbase, Zimbio, Digg, or any other social type site. This is because their page rank could artificially inflate our average. AND, we can publish on these sites too. We are really looking for websites other than these types of sites.
So, if you look at the 1st page results and you have 8 “regular” old websites and 2 Ezinearticles, you would add up the page rank of the 8 sites and divide by 8 to get your average.
OK, almost done!!
6. In this last step, I simply scan the 1st page results we got in Step 5 for these social type sites. You can really do this step in conjunction with Step 5.
The reason for this is that if there are Ezinearticles or other sites like Digg on the 1st page results (WITHOUT quotes or operators), I know I have a really, really good shot at getting on the 1st page also because I can put content on these sites as well.
So, on my spreadsheet, I just make a notation that there are some of these social sites on page 1 and which sites they are.
You’ll go through these steps for each of your keywords. And by the way, there are software programs, like Micro Niche Finder, that will do the majority of these steps for you, but it’s nice to do it for free and I think it’s important to understand the steps involved.
How To Interpret What You Have
So, we have all these numbers in front of us and we need to pick the ones that we think we will have the best shot at ranking for. We want to start off by choosing 5 that we like.
IMPORTANT**I am going to give some guidelines below on what to look for, but the absolute most important thing to remember is that you have to not get frozen in choosing your keywords and determining which ones to target.
ALOT of people get frozen with fear at this point because they worry if they are doing it right or wrong…
DO NOT DO THIS, and don’t make it overly complicated. It’s not rocket science!
Pick what you think is best and get to work with your site and content (I’ll get into way more detail on this in a later post) because as you gain experience and confidence, you will start to know pretty quickly what you will be able to rank for and what you won’t be able to rank for. Just remember, keep moving forward.
OK, the guidelines I follow are as follows:
1. intitle/inanchor results below 20-25, the lower the better
2. Average page rank < 2-3
3. A social site on page 1 results
These are my “ultimate” guidelines, but I am flexible because I can’t always have my cake and eat it too. If you meet 1 & 2, but not 3, it’s probably fine. If you meet 2 & 3, but not 1, you’ll probably be OK.
I have ranked on page 1 for phrases with 200 intitle/inanchor and I have ranked when no social site is on page 1. These are simply guidelines. Again, choose what you think is best and move on to your site – you can’t sell anything if you don’t get some content up!
OK, this will keep you a little busy…my next post will be on getting our domain and setting up our site – and a cool tool I use that gets my affiliate sites up in literally minutes!
To your SUCCESS!
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Good stuff…cant wait to see the next one…2 questions
1. I suppose you dont really care about numbers in quotes because we know that the revised quotes probably knocks those numbers down? (wonder why there is such a disparity between the 2?
2. Would Ask.com be considered a social sight? I found that one some of my searches…
1. Yep, after I wrote the post, I actually wondered why I even look at the quotes results. It’s partly habit and partly because I want to see if I can find something with less than 5,000 results. I get kind of excited when I do that initial quote search if I can find something with really low results
2. Ask.com itself is a really high ranking site, but you are probably seeing some of the questions from Ask.com ranking. Kind of like Yahoo answers that rank. I disregard them because in my experience it has been easy to outrank them with targeted content.
[...] middle of creating my new site, I thought I would ditch my usual method of keyword research (found in this post and emphasizing looking at average page rank of the first 10 results) and give it a [...]