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Choosing Keywords for Your Website

Choosing keywords is critically important before you ever begin building your website. You want to have at least 40-50 keyword phrases to make sure that your topic is broad enough to base a website on. By picking the most profitable keyword phrases, you can bring targeted traffic to your website.

In our last lesson on website content development, you learned how to research keywords to make sure that your website concept has the potential to be profitable. Expanding your keyword list will help you refine your website concept even more.

Expanding Your Keyword List

Choosing keywords that are very specific is essential to getting targeted traffic. For help in developing a set of focused keyword phrases, use the Google Keyword Tool. When the search box loads, type in your main keyword and click "Get keyword ideas".

This will return a list of words and phrases that contain your specific keyword and how many times they were searched for in the last month. To get a more accurate idea of the search volume for the exact keywords, look for "Match Types" and select the "Phrase" option. Write down these keyword phrases and the global monthly search volume for each.

An Example of Expanding Your Keywords

Using the word "cat" as an example, the keyword phrase "cat food" has 1,220,000 searches, so we will expand on this. Here are the results when we click on the term cat food (showing only the top keywords).

From the list of keyword results, you can do further research on each individual keyword phrases by typing that word into the Google Keyword tool. For example, we expanded our cat food keywords to generate even more targeted keyword phrases. You can see the results here.

Using the example above to guide you, take each of your initial keyword phrases and research them further using the Google keyword suggestion tool. Record your results.

Finding Related Keywords

It's easy to focus your keyword research using the terms that are common to people that already know your topic. But don't stop there.

There are a variety of words people might use that you haven't even considered. This is why you need to research other phrases by looking up synonyms and related words.

Again, you can use the Search It tool. To find related keywords follow these steps:

Under Step 1 choose brainstorming from the drop-down menu.
Under Step 2 choose Thesaurus Synonym Generator from the drop-down.
Under Step 3 type in the first keyword phrase from your list.
Click the Search It button

Searching through the various synonyms will give you keywords that are related to your website concept. Using our "cat" example, you would find these related keywords: feline, kitty, kitten, domestic cats, litter box, scratching post.

Take this list of related keywords and use the Google Keyword Tool to find the number of searches for each phrase. Be sure to further expand your list by doing a search on the individual results.

After you have found keywords with good potential, add them to your list, along with how many times they are searched for. By now, you should have a pretty extensive list for choosing keywords that will generate targeted traffic.

Determining Supply For Your Keyword Phrases

Now you will need to determine how much competition there is for your various keyword phrases. Using the Search It tool, follow these steps to find how many web pages contain these keywords:

Under Step 1 choose competition from the drop-down menu.
Under Step 2 choose Google Single Keyword SUPPLY from the drop- down.
Under Step 3 type in your most searched for keyword.
Click the Search It button

Once you are at the google search page, you can find the competition for the rest of your keywords. Just be sure to put quote marks on either side of your keywords so the results are based only on those sites that provide the exact keyword phrase.

Do this research for each of your keyword phrases and record the results.

To show you how this works, we will use the "cat food" example to search for the competition for each of our keywords. Here are the results of our search for our cat food keyword phrases.

Calculating The Potential of Your Keywords

To calculate the potential of your keywords, you need to determine how many searches there are (from the Google Keyword tool) in comparison to how much competition there is (from the Google Search engine). This is where you break out the calculator.

For your first keyword phrase, divide the number in the searches column by the number in the competition column. This will give you a rough estimate of the potential for that keyword. You can multiply this number by 1000 so that your results are easier to analyze. Continue to calculate the potential for each of your keyword phrases and record the results in your potential column.

Continuing with our "cat food" example from above, here is what the potential looks like for each of our example keyword phrases.

Choosing Keywords

By choosing keywords that have the highest potential, you can pinpoint the specific topics that people are searching for. This will help focus your website concept, form the basis of your individual website pages, and help you choose the perfect domain name.

This exercise on choosing keywords probably seems like a lot of work, but don't rush through it. Take the time to research the potential of all of your keyword phrases and record the results before moving on. If you are really serious about choosing keywords that are best for your website, I would recommend Site Build It with it's built-in keyword brainstorming tools.

In our next lesson, we will use these specific keyword phrases to help determine the best domain name for your website concept.

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