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.