SEO Tips for beginners
I have written before about search engine optimization or SEO, but I wanted to run through a few basics about starting out and keywords. For a lot of people, SEO is something that other people do and many people never attempt as they feel it is too complex for a beginner.
The very first thing that anyone hoping to make money online with a website or blog should do is decide on a keyword, a keyword is simply a search term you would like people to find your site listed under, for example if you are starting a blog about books, maybe you want to review books, the first keyword that you may think of is “books”, google it now, how many results do you get? I got 1,100,000,000. There are too many results and if you think about it who really types “books” in as a search term? It is too broad. Now try “book reviews” I get 124,000,000. A lot less, but still too many, but at least it is a term that some people may use if they were searching for book reviews.
Think about your site, what type of books do you plan to review? fiction, non fiction etc, this is the first stage of your research, try out all the different combinations of keywords you can come up with, try and find a search term that does not have millions of results, but try to keep it to a phrase that someone would realistically use when searching for your site, ideally keep it short, three words, depending on your topic this may be easier or more difficult. Terms like “make money online” and “Search engine optomization” are very competitive niches. Try and pick a niche that you will be able to create a lot of content about.
Once you have found your main keyword, you need to do it again, try out all the variations of your main keyword, you want around ten keywords to start with, once you have a list of ten or so you need to do a little more research
Keyword research for SEO – search volume
This is the second part of your research and often a part that is neglected, but to be successfull you really need to do your research on this one. You need to find out how many people are searching for your keywords. You can have a great niche in mind, but if no one is searching for information on it you are wasting your time. The easiest way to do this is to use the free google adwords keyword tool. This will tell you roughly how many people are searching the internet for your keywords, it will also give you related keywords that you can add to your list. Go through your list and write down the results with the highest search volume. Get rid of the ones (if any) that return very few searches. Add any results that have a high search volume, they are worth keeping in mind for later use.
Next you need to find out if the keywords you are considering are profitible, this is slightly easier, there are more complex ways of doing this, but for a general idea, google each of your keywords again. What you are looking for this time is sponsored listings. The google ads at the top and sides of the search results. Google “twilight” yes the book, its popular at the moment so you would think it is profitible, but if you are hoping to make money with adsense, this would not be a good keyword to use, there are no sponsored results, nobody is paying to display ads about “twilight” so you are not going to get relevent adsense ads on your blog about “twilight” because there are none. Now Google “SEO” there are quite a few, but there are also millions of results, it is a very competitive niche. What you want are keywords with a reasonably low amount of results but with sponsored ads displayed.
Once you have followed the three steps above you should have a good idea of how many people are searching for the topic you want to write about, how competitive your topic is and if it is profitible. Your research is not fool proof so if the results are good try them out with a free hosted blog before you purchase a domain.
The next step will be setting up your blog or site using your keywords, you want to make your site “search engine friendly” I will write about setting your blog up with SEO in mind in the next post. For now find your keywords, do all the research and come up with a list of words you would like to target.
