In the last two articles of this series, we talked about what keyword is, how it is used, and how to narrow down your search for the right keyword for your website. This article will take the discussion on keywords forward, and we will discuss how to find the right keywords or key phrases for your web site, before discussing the tools we should use for researching keywords.
Finding a keyword of just one word would be ideal for any website but this is almost never possible, no niche keyword can be of one word. Let’s understand it with the example we discussed in previous article. Suppose we decide to use one word, say “books”, as a keyword for our future website. Now the question arises, is it a right keyword or can we consider it to be a keyword per se? The answer will be no for the first question and yes to the second question.
“Books” is a keyword because people do search this term when looking for information, but this keyword is too generic and optimizing a website for this keyword will fetch no result, hence it cannot be considered a right keyword for any website. To make our website more focused and more useful for the visitors, we need to narrow down our field, as “books” is a generic keyword that describes any and every book. We can narrow down our keyword by adding a modifier to the word “books,” let’s say we add a modifier “marketing” to our existing generic keyword “books.” Now we have a more focused keyword, “marking books.” “Marketing books” is indeed a good keyword and it will fetch many visitors to the website, but let’s try and add one more modifier to this keyword in order to make this keyword more attractive for the visitors, and the modifier we should add is “best.” The new keyword “best marketing books” will be more attractive, and it will fetch many more visitors than a simple keyword, “marketing books” can.
One thing worth reminding here is, we should not go on adding modifier after modifier to our base keyword; it will become useless and the length will become unrealistically long. Generally speaking, we should keep the length of our keywords to maximum three words. There will be time when having a 4-word keyword or key phrase will be better than having 3-word keyword, for example, “Top 10 marketing books”, but always keep the use of 4-or-more-word keywords to the minimum. Do not use too many of them.
There are two more critical criteria on which you should base your decision regarding keywords on; one is the number of searches done by the user per day or per month in “phrase match” mode for the keyword, and another is the competition for the keywords, i.e., the number of pages Google or any other search engine produces for the keyword. The keyword that has in excess of 100 searches per day and less than 600,000 or 500,000 result pages in Google (depending upon the nature of your keyword) can be a good niche keyword.
In order to give you time to think over keywords, I have decided to stop this article here only. In the next article we will discuss about the applications that come handy in conducting a keyword research. We will also discuss about the art and science of keyword research in the next article that will conclude the topic.
