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When I first began my blog, I did keyword research (or at least that’s what I thought it was.) I used the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and was so excited from the amount of keywords my initial search returned. Instantly I thought, I will have keyword blog post ideas forever! However, as I would soon find out, my initial keyword optimization research was only the beginning. The answer to correctly doing SEO was just starting.

For this blog, I searched “make money online” and discovered that term was searched 1,000,000 times in Google last month. The keywords column shows the specific keyword that was searched. If you enter “make money online”, the Keywords tool will bring back the 118 keywords containing the word “make money online” that were searched for last month.

The next column is the ‘Advertiser Competition’ column. This column shows the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google. The shaded bar is a general guide to help you determine how competitive ad placement is for a particular keyword. Generally, you can take that number times 3, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month.

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The big mistake I made and a lot of other webmasters make is to assume that by optimizing this keyword, your site will wind up in the top of the Google search pages. That is incorrect, never take the most searched for terms and try to make a niche, blog post, or website around it. Instead, create a niche out of a niche in order to attract more visitors. When you use the highly searched for keywords, you will no doubt get outranked by your competition who are bidding high dollars for those keywords. However, this can actually work in your favor, just a little. If you have a blog, and you write an article based upon the high ranked keywords, your post may ’show’ some of those Adsense ads on your blog, and your limited traffic, might click on one of those ads. Keep in mind, this is all hypothetical, that your visitors ‘might’ click on an ad that ‘might’ show up in your Adsense ads.

Let’s not deal with theory. Let’s look at facts.

It’s always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and THEN you can focus on the larger keywords.

Take a look at keyword phrases like: “make money online right” which was only searched for 590 times globally last month. Global Monthly Search Volume is the
column which shows the approximate average monthly number of search queries matching each keyword result. This statistic applies to searches performed on Google and the Search Network over a recent 12-month period. It includes traffic in all countries and languages and is specific to your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu. However, this is a good phrase to target as a headline topic. Whenever you write, your headline has to attract people AND the search engines.

A little trick I learned to do is to play with the arrangement of the keyword phrases that are suggested by the Google Keyword Tool. For instance, the title of this blog post is a direct result of playing around with the keyword tool. While writing this post, I discovered that there were only 671,000 websites that had these exact words in its title or somewhere in the body of its content. But, NONE had this exact title. That’s good news for me, once I post this article, I will check to see if my theory holds true that I will gain lots of traffic from people searching for keyword optimization building search engine efficiency.

Also, take a look at your competition, others in your niche that are ranking high in the search engines. Discover what keywords they are using and optimize your posts and your site using variations of those words. Check this by viewing the page source and copying one or two of those keywords into the Google keyword tool. I know I’ve mentioned the Google keyword tool a lot, but there are other free ones out there as well, such as Wordtracker, WebCEO and Trellian. These all have free trial periods, then you may want to upgrade if you like them. Usually I use WebCEO and Google, they work very well for my needs right now as they will you as well.

Find the Best Keywords for Your Business and Drive More Traffic to Your Website!

Tags: keyword optimization, keyword optimization tips, SEO