There is a lot to discuss, so today's lesson is jam-packed with detail.

So, let's dive in!

KEYWORDS = Words that are used in search engine searches to find specific information, products or services.

Keyword Research: "How Do I Choose Good Keywords For My Website?"

Keyword research is the process of determining which keyword phrases best describe your website's products and/or services. Obviously, that will depend on the niche market you have chosen (see Lesson Two). When you have chosen some keywords, you will need to narrow down your list by doing some further research and asking, "What keywords are people searching for?" If you have not thought about how to get the right keywords for your website you may not be getting the most suitable visitors and those who do land on your pages may not want to read your information or buy your products.

HOW TO GET THE RIGHT KEYWORDS: A THREE STEP PROCESS

STEP 1: DISCOVERY PHASE

Initially you need to sit down and brainstorm a list of keyword/keyword phrases that address the topic of your web site. Have a dictionary and thesaurus handy. At this point include every word or phrase that you can think of. The point is not to find the best keywords at this stage.

There are several keyword tools that are available to help you generate a keyword list. Google's Adwords Tool is free.

You can access it here:

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

You can also use the user-friendly keyword suggestion tools that Empowerism.com offers free to members as part of their extensive portfolio of Internet marketing research services.

With these tools you will be able to generate hundreds of keyword phrases.

STEP 2: ANALYSIS PHASE

I use almost every one of the 24 SEO tools available in the Empowerism.com member centre to maximize my keyword analysis options and to find the best keywords for my campaign. The more specific your keyword phrase, the more relevant and targeted your traffic will be.

You can use Google's Adword tool to get an idea of the value placed on a keyword (i.e. its competitiveness) by checking the "Estimated Avg. CPC" (Cost Per Click) column after you have entered a keyword and a suggested CPC value.

You can find how many searches are conducted for various keyword phrases by using the free keyword research tool provided by WordTracker at:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

Add up the total number of searches for your TOP 5-7 keyword phrases to find the total search volume.

Between the 5-7 keyword phrases, the sum of all of them combined, should total at least 75,000 - 100,000 searches per month.

That means at minimum, you should have 5 keyword phrases that get searched 500 times per day. Or 7 keyword phrases that get searched 350 times per day. You get the idea. If you don't have that much...then the niche is not worth pursuing. Move on to the next one.

(Note, although you want your TOP 5-7 keywords to attract a reasonable number of hits, the rest of your list can also be useful for pulling in extra traffic.)

STEP THREE: KEYWORD SELECTION PHASE From your analysis phase, you should be able to identify a number of high quality keyword phrases that accurately describe the qualities of your website. Select a dozen keywords and key phrases from your list. This is a very important exercise and you should spend at least a couple of hours, if not more, researching different keywords.

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While you are researching your keywords, check your competitors by doing a search in a couple of popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc., using those keywords. Keep a record of your competitors' urls and other information because you don't want to waste your time doing the same search again in the near future.

To find which sites use the exact keyword phrase, place it between inverted commas, "" to narrow down the search.

In your final selection of keyword phases you need to look for phrases that have a high level of search activity, while the level of competitiveness is relatively low.

To make your final selection of 15-20 of the best keywords and keyword phrases you will want to do a Google search on the keyword phrases and view the top web sites listed for each phrase. Also, check the number of competing sites. Don't be put off by high numbers, but initially, aim to get your site in the top 1-5 ranking on the first page for keywords that are on no more than 5,000 sites.

Longer keyword phrases (also known as "long tail keywords") can be used to get one or more of your webpages to the very top of the rankings for some less frequented but highly relevant search terms, so feel free to cheerfully attack phrases with just a few sites to compete against.

Are the top listed sites professionally designed? Can you design a web page that can move up into the top ratings for this keyword phrase? It is not as difficult as you may imagine, especially when you bring article marketing (Lesson Nine) and blogging (Lesson Five) into play.

ONE KEYWORD OR KEYWORD PHRASE PER PAGE

When starting a new web site it's highly recommended to target only ONE UNIQUE KEYWORD per page. With your newly researched keyword list you can write your content with a balanced use of unique phrases that will help generate traffic to your web pages.

1. If it is not already too late, insert your prime keyword in your Domain Name.

2. Place your keyword phrase between your headline tags, H1 /H1, also between H2 /H2 and H3 /H3 tags.

3. Use your selected keyword phrase between your TITLE /TITLE tags. The title tag should be less than 64 characters long. Again, the key is to use a meaningful title using the keywords. Don't just make a laundry list of your keywords for the title tag.

4. Put your keywords in each page file name. For example if you make a new web page for the keywords "Japanese Maple Bonsai" you could give the page a title like: Japanese-Maple-Bonsai.html.

5. Use the keywords you selected into the meta tags of your home page. Meta tags are located in the head section of a web page. They are not as important as they used to be, but still, it is worth including keywords in the Meta Tags as they are sometimes used by search engines to provide site descriptions.

   The two important meta tags are keywords and description meta tags. Don't leave them blank. You can list your keywords, separated by comma, in the keywords meta tag.

   Construct a catchy description using your keywords for the description meta tag.

   Like the title tag, your meta description may end up in many search engine listings. So, spend sometime to make these two elements interesting, meaningful, and relevant to your site.

6. In the home page content, use bold, using the strong html element, to highlight some of your keywords.

7. Italicize some of the keywords in your page.

8. Use the keywords in ALT tags of images. You should always use the ALT tag for all images.

9. Encourage others to use the keywords for text anchors when they link back to your site. Better yet, publish your own short link text with keyword anchors, bold and italicized key phrases and give it away for link exchanges (see Lesson Twelve) and use in your article signature file (see Lesson Nine).

10. Place your keyword phrase in the first sentence and elsewhere in the first 250 or so words of your text. Keep the keyword density around 3%-6% of total content. Keyword Density refers to the percentage of occurrences of your keywords in relation to the text on your web page.

    It is most important that your main keyword has the correct density if your page is to rank well in the search engines.

    Again, the Keyword Density Reporter available to Empowerism.com members will crawl the URL, extract the text (just like a search engine does), remove common "stop" words, and analyze the keyword density for you.

    The results give you a visual display of the keywords used on your website. The keywords that have a higher density are shown in larger fonts. Ideally, your major keywords should be the ones in a larger font shown at the top of the report.