I’ve been giving a lot of thought to keyword research. Probably too much. I’ve spent the better part of the last couple of weeks trying to find keywords to build sites around. This is possibly a worse activity than getting backlinks. It’s very disappointing to try to find keywords that pay AND those that have visitors AND you can compete with. The ever elusive “green keywords”.

Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder helps. I find potential keywords in MFN and drop them in MS to see if the competition sucks or not. Most times it sucks. Have you noticed how incredibly competitive keywords are? Maybe I am the exception here but I may find but a few keywords worthy of using in an hour of punching in ideas. I probably would have better luck panning for gold in the drainage ditch across the street.

It’s just a pains-taking exercise. Mostly futile. Sometimes a winner. Whatever. It’s all in the game. You have to start somewhere and grabbing the best keywords you can is just prudent. But for me that’s where it ends. After I get indexed keywords start populating my Analytics. It may be 3-6 months before anything happens. You just have to keep getting backlinks obviously. Some work out. Others languish in the swamp. That’s why we sling ‘em far and wide. But those new keywords are what I start working with.

I came across this excellent article from Wordtracker I thought I’d share. It’s about long tail keywords. Really there is nothing in here that you haven’t read before at Griz’s site. Griz talked about writing long posts over a year ago. This article pretty much says the same thing. But the article gives you a good perspective of “head” keywords – those that everyone targets at the start and desperately want to rank  and “long tail keywords” – the keywords that result in 90% of folks finding your shitty blog. Here’s the meat of the post:

Head keywords remain irresistible to many SEOs and website owners. They want to see their site top of Google’s results pages for them. They become trophy keywords.

Plus, few people want to go through the learning curve required to start thinking about groups of keywords (keyword niches).

But as well as ignoring most searches, head keywords are very competitive. Increasingly, despite Google’s fight against paid links, to get top of Google for the big money keywords you need to pay for your site’s inbound link power. Which we don’t want to do, so…

So let’s learn how to play with the long tail…
How to make a profit in the long tail

How do you make a profit from keywords that bring just one visit a month? Easy, you target lots of them at once – you target groups of keywords (keyword niches). Here’s how…

Let’s start simply with one page. Your SEO might focus on one or two keywords but you’re really targeting those keywords and their long tails. And the more relevant and related words on your page, the more of that tail you can get results for. I love 2,000 word articles. ..

…This long tail tactic is so effective that you can get great results from a page without getting anything from its primary target keyword. E.g. the page mentioned above doesn’t get a top 10 ranking for either swot analysis or strengths and weaknesses. I summarize this tactic as …

Target the head and exploit the tail

This does not mean that you should spend hours stuffing (or just adding) relevant keywords to your pages. That spoils your copy and usually takes too long to be profitable. It means that you:

Plan the structure of your site’s content, organizing it into categories, e.g. sports cars and family cars for a car site.

Allocate (e.g.‘tag’) existing content to relevant categories.

Each category has a category home page, e.g. a sports car page, that lists links to relevant pages on your site.

For each category, find target keywords (of course I really mean keyword niches). E.g. italian sports cars, sports car insurance.

If a keyword niche is big then make it a category. E.g. italian sports cars might become a category. Planning a site’s structure can be a big job.

For each target keyword, commission or write a long article with lots of words.

Don’t sweat on the individual keywords within your articles. Leaving that copy natural will target 1000s (sometimes 10s of thousands) of keywords. The big job is the initial keyword research and subsequent site planning.

Analyze results. Which keyword niches bring the most response? Continue your keyword research – looking for more keyword niches to target.

Word.

Found two more tools that I really like. Magic Article Rewriter and Magic Article Submitter. I bought them both. If you have any need to re-write articles to splash around to satellite properties and article directories then this is the tool that can make it happen easily. I tried out Leger’s tool, The Best Spinner. It’s not. Magic Article Rewriter most certainly is. And it is cheaper. And it integrates nicely with Magic Article Submitter which has a database of around 1,200 article directories to submit to. Honestly, I’ve never seen an easier submission tool than this.

So check it: I threw a PLR article into MAR. I bought the token database as well so it became a simple push button exercise to “rewrite” the thing. It instantly became 45% spun. It read perfectly fine. I made a few extra adjustments so it would be at least half to 60% unique. The token system is easy and typical.

Here is the cool as shit thing about the tool. It has an export button to your favorite article services like UAW and AMA. It adjusted the article for the AMA format. I opened up AMA dropped the article in and went through and added additional sentences where possible (For those in AMA you know what I’m doing). That article in, let’s say 10 minutes, became 100% unique to splash across the blog network.

Then I turned my attention to MAS. I created a profile. Probably 75-80% of the directories accepted my registration. And registration and validation and all that crap is super quick. I set up a “real” email on a hosted domain and had it forward to a Gmail account. I continued the profile wizard after waiting about 15 minutes to make sure I would scoop up all the validation emails that would trickle into Gmail.

Once I had registered the majority of the emails, I ran the keyword search to make sure I submitted to the right categories. Yea, it only submits to those directories that have the right category to submit to. Slick. I added the article, summary, resource box and tags into MAS. All fields spinnable. Clicked the big green button. Within 15 minutes or so I had 400 articles in the directories. 200 or so were pretty much instantly approved. All dubious quality of course but backlinks nonetheless. It has a nice submission check feature to see if your article was approved. You can schedule submissions too. It never felt like a burden.

Bought a lot of shit recently. Micro Niche Finder. Market Samurai. Magic Article Rewriter. Magic Article Submitter. Cost me $300. Shit, my dad was self employed and would spend thousands on tools for his shop if he thought it would speed the process up or make things easier on him and the guys. Some worked. Some didn’t. But the bottom line was better processes and more money. I understand that nobody approves of buying tools. That everything should be done manually and for free. That all content must pass the rigors of Google quality. Well, nobody is playing by the rules. They haven’t since the day I started slinging websites. If backlinks are what Daddy G wants then backlinks is what I will give him. I don’t want to sling utter shit though. MAR will rewrite a good article into many versions so I can distribute it without worry across my tiers and into AMA. MAS slings an article into hungry directories. Tie it up with a nice BMD run.

I wish it hasn’t come to this but it’s all about backlinks. Maybe Google figures out another way to rank our webpages tomorrow. Maybe backlinks mean nothing by summertime. But right now the one with the most/best backlinks win. Sorry it’s just the way it is. You may get lucky with some groovy long tail keywords and satisfying SEO but it’s only a matter of time before the competition takes you down if you don’t have copious amounts of backlinks. Maybe domain age will save you for a while. But there are some pretty big forces out there smashing the web with backlinks 24/7. The tools and networks are mind-blowing. The competition fierce. Autoblogging is what directory generators were in ‘04. Auto review sites are eating the web up. And that shit has gotten way more sophisticated.

No, I don’t want to sling shit. The article I drop into MAR is one that would be good enough to post into Ezine Articles or onto a money site. MAR makes very readable copies of it that you control. The article directories are very happy to receive your article. Believe it. They have Adsense and affiliate offers they want folks to click. And if someone scrapes your article from the directory, then that’s good for you, the directory and the dude that wants your content on his site. Lots of wins all around. Isn’t link sharing and content distribution what Google says it wants anyway? Sure you are manufacturing interest in your site with all these copies of your article that you hope Google’s algos interpret as unique content. It’s the game. Think Daddy G is playing fair?

I figure I either have to keep up or cut grass this summer for extra cash. I will keep trying to build sites people give a shit about but so far I haven’t created the next Mashable. But what I am creating is many little sites that are collecting buckets of change. Collect enough change and pretty soon you are talking real money. But all these sites need backlinks and content. I don’t have time to write college dissertations for every webpage. MAR and MAS is my edge.