Understanding which keywords to use in your site copy and article marketing initiatives is crucial to ensuring the time invested in promoting your sites actually pays off. Selecting the right keyword over the wrong keyword can effect the success of your site and how much money you make.

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are most common words people use when they search. The majority of people searching for credit cards, for example, are likely to use the keyword “Credit Cards” in their search. This makes the term “Credit Cards” highly valuable and very competitive. This is precisely why keywords are the such a huge factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Forget short keywords, go for Long-Tail Keywords.

Popularity of one keyword over another can differ dramatically and attract completely different types of users. The best keywords are ones that will convert highly qualified users by providing them with search results that meet their search request the closest.

This principal is the guiding law of Googles search results. The only service Google really provides is the ability for someone to quickly find exactly what they are looking for. Google will examine the content on your site and determine the best placement for your pages depending on how they perceive the value match between that content and the search keywords.

Googles method presents an excellent opportunity for the use of “Long-Tail” keywords. Long-Tail keywords are keyword phrases that define the search as closely as possible

Returning to the example of “Credit Cards”. If a student with poor credit is looking for a credit card, they are most likely will simply type “credit cards” into search box. It’s far more likely they’ll use a Long-Tail keyword phrase, such as “student credit cards” or even “poor credit student credit cards”, or some variation of that long-tail keyword phrase.

Because this is focused search the amount of traffic searching for “ poor credit student credit cards” will be much less than Credit Cards.

For example, the amount of sites listed in google for the term “credit cards” is 124 million.  “Poor credit student credit cards” are only 2.3 million. So the chances of getting your site on the first page of “Poor credit student credit cards” is far more doable than the first page of Credit Cards.

Long-Tails can be used to even dig deeper, such as “poor credit student credit cards in Los Angeles” has only 293,000 sites competing.
Not only do the long-tails enhance the changes of getting a site on the first search results page, they attract pre-qualified customers. So the conversions from a highly
keyword selection are much higher than tons of worthless traffic from too general of a keyword.

How to find Long-Tail Keyword phrases.

Even though it’s a manual approach, I’m all for sitting in front of an empty spreadsheet and trying different combinations of keywords and phrases. Nobody and no automated system knows your business better than you. You’re also a consumer, who uses the search engines every day. This makes you an expert, so don’t be afraid to put that expertise to use.

After an initial list as created, or you burn out on making your long-tail keyword list, it’s time to go to Google. Set up a google adwords account and use the Keyword search tool. The results of this will largely be they keyword terms you’ve already thought of, but there will be others that you have not thought of in the list as well. Some of those could be very valuable. The Google keyword search tool only generates keyword phrases that have been actually searched on. This can help you edit you master list.

I’ve used paid tools like WordTracker, and a few others. So far the results were less than impressive. I found WordTracker hard to use and clunky. I am planning to use Keyword Elite soon and am hoping it works as well as the video promos suggest.

Using Long-Tail Keywords in your content

The final keyword list should consist of both short-tail and long-tail keywords. The next step is to convert these keywords to content by creating focused articles for each keyword. The game-plan is to built high-quality article content on your site that will find its way into the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) for your keywords.

The longest of the long-tail keyword pages should find there way to the first page for their keywords and start to deliver trickles of traffic within the first few weeks of the page going live. Sometimes is takes less time depending on the popularity of the topic.

The idea is that those long-long-tails will start to traffic and help the more competitive terms rank as Google recognizes the overall authority of your site.

The article content is important in that is has to be human readable and provide interesting and accurate information for the person reading it. This approach will take the page much farther than poorly written keyword laden content that is obviously slapped together to game the search engine results. There are several auto-article writing applications available- stay away. I’ve tried a few and they are all horrible.

I’ve had the most success from hiring writers to produce unique keyword rich content for me. This takes the burden of developing quality content off my back, and enables a different voice to talk about my topic.

When an article is written, either by me or a writer, there are a few standards I put in place to ensure the articles are maximized for the SERPS.

Use the exact keyword phase as the title- If the article keyword is “Poor Credit Student Credit Cards” then I title it “Poor Credit Student Credit Cards.” Don’t get cute with titles. Keep it exact.

Don’t abuse the keywords it the articles- Work them into the content where appropriate, and don’t repeat them more than 3 times per 500-750 word article.

Keep articles between 500-750 words- This is enough to make them legit, and short enough so that a writer can quickly finish them.

Keyword Research tools:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool