A Little Keyword Research Can Go A Long Way

Today we have a guest post by Morgan Linton of Domainvestors.tv and Linton Investments, here is a bit more about Morgan:

Morgan is the publisher of Domainvestors.tv a blog about Domain Name Investing with a focus on Video. Morgan is also the Founder of Linton Investments, a Domain Name Investment company in Los Angeles, California. Morgan has also written a popular book about Domain Flipping available from DNFlipping.com.

Many people know that using keywords and anchor-text can go a long way towards improving your search engine ranking. What most people fail to realize though is that it is not just picking any keywords, it is picking the right keywords that will bring solid targeted traffic to your website or blog.

So how can you identify which keywords your target customer is looking for? It's not as hard it you might think but it does take knowing how to use the right tools. The first tool you want to look at is the Google Adwords Keyword tool. If you don't know what this is - get ready to meet your new best friend. The Google Adwords Keyword tool is like a Google cheat sheet. It gives you data on how many people are searching for a particular keyword (or keywords) on Google every month. On top of this it also shows you which related keywords are most frequently searched so that you can make a top ten list of the most searched keywords relating to the keywords in your domain name. 

Here's an example. Suppose you own the domain name Kayaking.org - you would use the Google Adwords keyword tool to determine what keywords related to Kayaking have the highest search volume on Google. In the case of Kayaking - the top five related keywords are (in order of search volume) - canoeing kayaking, canoe kayak, kayak fishing, sea kayak, and ocean kayak. Do you think this would have been the five related keywords you would have guessed? This is a step that many Domainers forget - they assume that they know what the most popular keywords are when they haven't taken the time to do the research. In the case of Kayaking there could be thousands of related keywords, but only five that get a bulk of the searches - these are the keywords you want to use in your text and anchor text within your site. 

Suppose I decided to guess the most popular keywords and picked "kayaking trip" as one of my anchor text phrases. I use this keyword phrase instead of "canoeing kayaking" because who the heck would think of that? Well "kayaking trip" gets around 4,000 searches on Google a month, "canoeing kayaking" on the other hand gets around 450,000 a month - pretty big difference don't you think! This research only takes a few minutes of time but can go a long way towards allowing your domain to rank well for keywords that people are actually searching for. 

Another great keyword research tool you can use is Wordtracker. While this is not a free tool, it is an excellent way to research keywords and determine which keywords are the best fit for your site. Wordtracker goes a step further than the Google Adwords Keyword Tool by providing even more detailed keyword data and an entire academy for learning more about how to use this data to improve your search engine ranking. Wordtracker even has a cool plugin for Firefox called "SEO Blogger" that will allow you to do your keyword research in a separate panel while you are writing a blog post. 

Whether you use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool or Wordtracker you will find-out very quickly how a little keyword research can go a long way. Remember, organic traffic is the best traffic you can get, not only is it free, but it is targeted traffic, so take your time, understand your keywords, and dominate the search engines!

Today is a guest post by Morgan Linton, here is a little background about Morgan, most of you are probably already familiar with Morgan but just in case....