Keyword Research For Beginners

This is page 3 of a 5 page keyword research tutorial.

We're off to a good start. On the previous pages we learned what keywords are, why keywords matter, how to find keywords, and where to put them. If you actually use what you've learned so far when building your web site, you'll be ahead of most webmasters.

In earlier times on the Internet what you've read so far was about all there was to keyword research, and we'd be done now.

In recent years the Web has become more competitive, so we'll continue our discussion of keyword research in to more advanced subjects.

The Top 10 Search Engine Results

Our goal here of course is to get our page listed on the search engines so that people will find us and visit our site.

Take a moment to reflect on how you use the search engines. You do your search, and then choose one or more links shown on the first page, or maybe second page, of search engine results. Right?

If we don't find what we're looking for on the first or second page of search engine results, we usually do another search.

So, it's not enough to get our page in to the search engines, we want to get our page listed on the first or second page of search engine results. That is, within the top 10 or 20 results listed for a search on our main keyword.

Being listed on page 34 of search engine results is unlikely to bring us many visitors.

Here's the catch.

There are millions webmasters in the world, and some number of them are writing on our topic.

And they all want to be on page one of search engine results.

Lots and lots of pages, and only 10 or 20 useful spots on the search engines for each keyword.

How do the search engines decide which pages to list first?

Which Article Is The Best?

To make a long story short, the search engines list the most popular pages first.

To simplify again, the search engines calculate the popularity of your page by counting how many links are pointing to your page.

Which makes sense when you think about it.

If 6 sites are linking to my squirrel page, and 600 web sites are linking to your squirrel article, then it's logical for search engines to reason your article is probably more popular than mine, because your article is better than mine.

In that case the search engines, in an attempt to serve their users with quality results, will list your flying squirrel article before mine.

It's not a foolproof method for gauging quality, but the search engines have to make this decision on billions of pages and searches somehow, and that's generally how they decide which pages are the best.

The search engines want to know two things about our page:

What is our page about?

How popular is our page?

Page Rank

Google has a system they call "Page Rank" for judging the popularity of pages.

Each page in the Google index is assigned a number on a 1 to 10 scale.

New pages have a page rank of zero, and extremely popular pages with thousands of links pointing at them have a page rank of 7, 8, 9 or 10. Most people's pages have a page rank somewhere in between these highs and lows.

To see page rank in action, let's visit a useful tool, and go check out the top 10 listings for the keyword "flying squirrels".

Please click this link.

As you can see, the SEO Chat site helps you do searches on different keywords, and see the page rank of all the pages listed in the search engine results.

The page rank is shown in the little green/gray line just below the title of each listing. The line will say 4/10 or 6/10, something like that.

If you're new to the subject of page rank, you might want to take a break here, and spend a few minutes playing around with the SEO Chat tool, exploring topic areas that are of interest to you. Keep an eye on the page ranks of the pages listed in the results.

Sidestepping The Competition

By reading this far you've put yourself in a position to start understanding how keyword research really works on the Internet today.

To really succeed, it's no longer enough to just find out what people are searching for, and then give it to them.

As example, we might think,

"Hey, I'll choose "cars" as my main keyword, I'm sure that's popular."

Ok, let's check the search engine results for "cars". Please click this link.

Check the page ranks of the pages that are on the first page of results for "cars".

Wow, these pages are page rank 6 and above. Cars is indeed a popular search, and that's why many professional webmasters have already created very popular pages around that keyword.

The chances of a novice webmaster getting a high listing for "cars" is not good at all.

So, what do we do then?

We find keywords that are less competitive, and build our articles around those keywords.

So, we still want to target keywords people are interested in, but not the keywords that are so competitive that we have little chance of getting a good search engine listing.

If a topic is too popular, a novice webmaster won't get listed high enough in the search engine, because of all the competition.

If a topic isn't popular enough, we won't get much traffic to our site even if we do get a top listing.

We want to strike a balance between targeting popular topics, and low competition topics. That's where the opportunity lies.

Luckily for us, there are specialized tools available that can help us find keywords that represent a good opportunity. We'll discuss these tools in the upcoming pages.

Homework Assignment

If the concepts we discussed on this page are new to you, read this page another time or two, and do some page rank exploring. What we're going to discuss next will be unnecessarily confusing if you don't understand what we've discussed so far.

A key thing to understand is that, while all this may sound rather challenging at first, there are still plenty of low competition keywords for you to work with. Once you get familiar with the concepts and tools, you'll have no trouble finding useful keywords to build your articles around.

OK, see you on the next page.

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