What Keywords Should I Target?
March 11th, 2009 | by Conrad Walton |I’ve been doing some research on keywords for a couple clients and for a couple of my own sites. It’s amazing what sites are out there and just how many of them.
It’s frustrating to think that you can pick a keyword or a keyword phrase and own it in a few weeks. Even if the competition is not that tough. There are thousands of pages out there that talk about exactly what you want to own.
A lot of the tools will give you some phrase that seems really good, but there’s no way that the data they are telling you can be correct. It’s just wrong sometimes. I’ve been checking Yahoo against Google to see if they match what they are saying as far as number of searches per month, etc. Yahoo seems to have some strange bumps in the data, so I’m trusting Google data much more.
I think that the key to it all will be time. Get your domain out there as soon as possible. Get some content on it and try to optimize it. It looks like we are moving past keyword density and towards relevant content. Even if it’s not the exact phrase that you want to score well for, you need to have a lot of related, relevant content around your phrase.
Back links seem to be king also, but be careful on the timing, the anchor text, the page rank of the source page, the keywords on the source page. Again, it seems that having relevant content, that works for people, is the best way to get ranked for your search terms. There are no games, not magic potions, or secret back doors.
Target the keywords that you want to target. Work the back links. Write good content. It’s pretty straight forward, but a lot of hard work.
