What Will People Search For?

Guys this is one of the most important topics of SEO and internet marketing. You should be on the constant look out for what people will be typing in to find your website, blog post, or sub pages. So how do we know what people are searching for? Well there is one great tool that I use ~ https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal You type in any keyterm and google will pull up how many times in the last month that term has been searched for. You can also use this tool~ http://www.google.com/trends (it is no longer in beta so I guess they decided to keep it) anyway this tool will tell you the popularity of a keyterm over an extended period of time. So let say you go to the adwords tool and type in the term "make money online" you find that last month there was around 200k searches for that term. Most people would stop there not concerned about how the term did a year ago, but not you. You go to Google trends and find that it has been riding very low and had a 1000X spike last month and if you go after the term it will fall back down to its average. Now this is not the case with the term make money online it is a very good term.

It is not all about tools and anaylitcs when you want to know what people are searching for. Let say you own a website that offers a massive list of directories. You have a goal of listing every free directory on the web and quickly banning any that begin charging. Well you have a list of 2k solid free directories. The problem is you have not been building any links and have very little traffic even after months of work. You know the list will be extremely helpful to webmasters on a fixed budget and really want to get the word out. You begin the process of working the SERPs ranking high for keywords that are well searched for and explain your website very well. To begin choosing keywords you go through the tools checking what people search for when wanting a large list of free directories some of the test would probably include "list of directories", "directory list", "free directory list", "free directory", "free directories", "general directories", and on and on. Now the problem is you are looking at term after term putting them in software wanting to find the most traffic. You have not thought about the subject with common sense and picked at least two or three terms which fit your site the best and didn't worry about traffic just went after the keywords. If I had a big list of free directories the terms I would certainly rank for no matter what the search volume would be "list of free directories", "big list of free directories", "free one way links", and "free directories". This is what I would spend my time with at first making sure I was ranking well for the keyterms which best represented my website.

As you dig into the world of search engine optimization and keyword research you should be keeping one thing in mind and that is if it was easy everyone would do it. You can look at big terms in your niche all day long it won't help you rank well for them. If you want to rank well for the "bank" terms in your niche the ones that pay the bills then expect to be working for a very long time. I have just passed my second year as a webmaster and I just reached the top for a term with 20k monthly search. This has definatley grown my income, but I still can not yet sit home and do this full time I need to keep working on the bigger keywords 100k+ terms. The reason I will get there is I am willing to build a few hundred links each and every day. It also helps that I will not be giving up any time soon.

Anyway if you liked this post please leave a comment and tell me what you think.