Choosing Good Keywords

Okay, so now that you've chosen your niche, it's time to do some good 'ole keyword research and accompanying competition analysis!

Gasp! What do these crazy terms mean, you ask?

Well, it's really quite simple. Keyword analysis means taking a look at the actual keywords and keyword phrases related to your niche that people are typing into Google on a regular basis.

Your goal will be to pick one good keyword phrase, as well as several secondary keyword phrases (the more the better). Our intent here is to rank high in Google for these keyword phrases, and that will be the primary means of driving traffic to our blog.

Competition analysis means checking to see how many websites are going to be in direct competition with your blog as you try to rank for those keyword phrases.

We'll start with keyword analysis. There are many ways you can do this. You can buy programs that will perform keyword research for you, but we won't bother with that here. For now we're going to concentrate on one tool, the Google Adwords Keyword Tool:

By imputting our keywords into this tool, we can see on average how many searches they get per month. Scroll down a little further, and you can find related keywords-- “Additional Keywords to Consider”.

Staying with same example of -  “bamboo fly fishing rods” check how much research is done on that keyword.  For example if you find 2400 searches per month. That's not bad. Generally, for your main keyword phrase, you'd like to have at least one or two thousand searches per month. If you can get more than that, it's even better.

Now let's go to Google and conduct some competition analysis for this keyword. Type your keyword phrase in quotes like this: “bamboo fly fishing rods”.

Notice how many search results pop up. Generally, anything under 30,000 is pretty good, and anything under 10,000 is great! So this keyword “bamboo fly fishing rods” has potential.

Now I like to conduct a couple more searches for good measure. Example - Search for allintitle: “bamboo fly fishing rods” . This will give you every website that has its title optimized for “bamboo fly fishing rods”

Next, imput in anchor:"bamboo fly fishing rods" and you'll see how many websites have “bamboo fly fishing rods” in its anchor text (link text). 

These results make up your REAL competition: the people who are actively trying to rank for this keyword by using on-page SEO and using the keyword in the title and in anchor text.

Now, to dig up a little bit more information on these sites, I like to use an add-on for Firefox called “SEO For Firefox”. Once installed, a little icon appears in the extreme lower right corner of your browser. Click on it and you'll be able to see more data about the websites you go to.

The site will give  description, highlighted in blue, you can see tons of information about the site. These are all factors that come into play when determining the site's rank. For Example -  This site might ranks #1 for the keyword “bamboo fly fishing rods”.

What you will want to do is try to determine WHY it ranks #1, and what you would have to do with your blog to try to compete with this site, as well as with all the other websites on page 1 of the Google search results.

I'm not going to go too in depth with competition analysis, because it's a wide topic that could comprise several eBooks on its own. If you need more info, do a quick Google search. There's tons of information that can be found all over the internet for free.

Once you've picked your main keyword phrase, go back to the Google Keyword Tool and select a whole bunch of secondary keyword phrases-- anywhere from 5 to 20. These don't have to have thousands of searches per month.

These secondary keyword phrases are meant to be the “low hanging fruit”-- they don't get tons of searches, but they also have very little competition, so they should be easy to rank for.