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How To Do Keyword Research For Internet Marketing

By: Brian Armstrong

Finding keyword phrases that will help you get traffic is one of the primary ways webmasters make money on the internet. If you target keywords that are too competitive, you'll be spending a lot of time with very little to show for it. If you can find keyword phrases that have little competition or that will require less work to achieve a top ranking in the search engines, you'll be able to get traffic to your website.
Start your research by brainstorming a list of keyword phrases that match what your website will be about or what you believe people are searching for when you want them to find your website. I've found that using a spreadsheet is the best way to keep track of your keywords. If you don't currently own Microsoft Office, you can use Google Docs or OpenOffice.
Once you've looked for those broad keywords, start looking for keyword phrases that match even more closely what you're going after. These 3+ word keyword phrases are usually known as "long tail" keywords. These longer keyword phrases usually represent an individual that is much closer to making a purchase or making a decision on a service.
Now that you've found both some broad and "long-tail" keyword phrases, it's time to see how many times per month these keywords get searched for. There are several free tools you can use to help you get these estimates. Freekeywords.wordtracker.com is one tool and another is Google Adwords keyword tool. These will both give estimates on monthly searches. Don't rely on just one of these tools, be sure to cross reference results so that you don't spend a lot of time going for a keyword phrase that doesn't really get that many searches.
Once you know how many monthly searches there are for your keywords, you need to know which of those keyword phrases have the most competition and the least competition of course. When you can identify keyword phrases that get a good amount of searches with very little competition, you'll have keywords that you can use to get some good results.
There are a few ways to narrow the competition to determine which keyword phrases are the best. The tools I use are the advanced search features available through Google. I use the allintitle, the allinanchor, and the search with the keyword phrase in quotes. People don't typically search that way, but remember that you are collecting data and not trying to mimic the search patterns of 99% of internet users.
In order to decide which keyword phrases to use, start with keyword phrases that have a minimum of 100 searches per day or 3000 searches per month. Of course, if you are very specialized, you may go for less than 100 searches per day. It all depends on what you want for your business. As far as competition, target keyword phrases that have less than 10,000 allintitle results. The lower you can get on this number, the easier it will be to rank high on the search engines.
Now that you have your keywords, you'll need to use those strategically on your website or your web pages so that you can get ranked in the search engines. Plan on using your keyword phrases in the title of the page, in the heading or h1 tags and then again as content in the page itself, usually about 3-6% "keyword density". After you've done this, work on getting some back links to your site, some links from other websites, such as social bookmarking sites. Obviously there's much more to getting backlinks and the other SEO components of what to do once you have your keywords. This is just the beginning. Good luck!

Article Source: http://www.ezine-directory.info

Brian focuses on helping individuals just like you start their internet business. In addition to articles, Brian also produces keyword marketing research videos. You can get the best web hosting and several vouchers for pay-per-click and also an iTunes gift cert.

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