Hi, welcome to Sunday Morning SEO. This is a new guide about search engine optimisation, or SEO for short. If you want to improve your rankings and increase your search engine traffic, tune in on Sunday mornings. My name is Dee Barizo and I’ve had experience as a full-time search marketer. This morning we’ll look at keyword research.
Keyword research is one of the fundamental activities in SEO. Many bloggers consider this activity to be tedious, but here are two quick and easy ways to find traffic generating keywords for your posts.
To illustrate these methods, let’s pretend you’re a sports blogger. With the NBA All-Star Game coming up in one week, you plan on publishing a couple posts about it this week. You expect a lot of basketball fans to be searching Google for information about the game. Therefore, you want to figure out the keywords that they might use and insert those keywords in your content.
You can go to Google and type in nba all star game. Here’s a screenshot.
You can actually click the keywords below nba all star game and go directly to the search engine results pages for those keywords. For example, clicking on nba all star game 2009 takes you straight to this results page.
As you can imagine, currently nba all star game is a very popular keyword. While searching for that keyword, many people will notice the other keywords and click them. This makes those other keywords great search terms to include in your content.
The second method involves searching for a popular keyword. Then, you can go to the bottom of the search results page and find related search terms.
So, sticking with our example, here is a screenshot of the bottom of the search results page for nba all star game 2009. You can click the screenshot for a bigger image.
Again, each of related keywords are links that point to the relevant search engine results page. Many people will see these keywords so it’s a good idea to target them with your posts.
Your Turn
Try these methods and let us know the keywords you discover.
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Good tips Dee. For sure, it will save some of our time looking for keywords.
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G’day Dee, Nice article.
Just a question, dow did you get google to give a drop down list when typing in the search box?
It doesn’t seem to do that for me?
Cheers
Daniel
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sorry but I dont’ get any related search results! Is there anything in particular that I need in Google settings first????
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Hey Dee great tips.
How do you judge the balance between lots of people will be looking for that against there are lots of results for that?
Using your example, for “nba all star game 2009″ you’d be one of 500,000 results so how do you decide if that’s a worthwhile keyword to use?
Cheers, Ian.
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@Daniel: Do you have Javascript enabled on your browser? You need Javascript for the drop down list to work.
@Anastasia: The related searches only works with popular keywords. Try searching for a short, highly-searched keyword.
@Ian: My next post will answer your question.
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a very good tip..thanks alot
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Ya you are right keyword chosen is also one of the major factor in seo which keyword i chose have traffic or not that is the question.
in your knowledge have nay site on which i see keyword traffic and hit also.
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Yeah, some peoples really don’t know that search engine now-days have the loophole to allow people enlarge their keywords.
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Excellent tips. I have book marked it in delicious. Thanks.
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Hey Dee, great way to break it down for those of us who do not have the advanced knowledge of an seo firm. I made the mistake in the beginning of choosing the wrong (and too many) keywords and couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t ranking. Hopefully someone who has made the same mistake reads this. Good job.