Keyword Research

Probably the most important part of your niche business is your keywords. Keywords are a mystery to many people. The term itself is misleading. When I hear "keyword", I think of a single word. Most people do. That's why they are confused when I try to explain long-tail keywords to them. The term itself should be changed to "keyphrase" or something like that. That would be less misleading.

A keyword isn't just one word usually. It's a phrase. These phrases are important to your niche sites because they bring in organic traffic. Organic traffic is simply traffic from search engines. This traffic is good because it doesn't depend upon anyone else other than the search engines. There are other ways to get traffic such as articles but those fade away quickly. If your site ranks well for a good keyword, it will get plenty of good visitors daily.

The difficulty of ranking your site for a keyword depends completely on the keyword itself. A single word keyword will be pretty much impossible to rank for. Even a two-word keyword will be nearly impossible to rank for. For instance, you couldn't rank for the word "printer". By rank, I mean first page of Google. You also couldn't rank for the keyword "HP printer". There's just too much competition for either of those keywords. You'd be lucky to show up in the first 100 pages or results.

So you have to look for keywords that aren't as difficult to rank for. Most of the time these will be three, four, or five words long. These are called "long-tail" keywords. If your site is optimized for a good long-tail keyword, you can rank for that keyword and get plenty of organic traffic. At the same time, you have to make sure that you are trying to rank for a keyword that gets traffic.

The two main things to remember when choosing a keyword is competition and search volume. You want low competition and high enough search volume to make the keyword worth your time. A high search volume keyword is useless if there is a ton of competition. Likewise a low competition keyword is useless if there is no search volume.

There are many factors when it comes to finding competition, but a useful strategy is to check the keyword in quotes in a Google search. Look at the amount of results. You should shoot for keywords with under 10,000 results competition. If you are just starting out, it would be best to shoot for under 1,000 results. This is a good way to judge competition. There are other factors like the quality of the first page results and such, but this is generally a good indication of how hard it will be to rank your site for that keyword.

That part isn't very complicated once you know what you are looking for. The other side of the coin is search volume. To find search volume, I suggest using a free tool called Traffic Travis. It has other functions as well, but the keyword tools works very well. It will show you how many searches a keyword gets per day on each search engine. Look for keywords that get around 10-100 searches per day. Ideally, you'd want more, but that's a good number to find the correct amount of competition.

Start with a single-word keyword that deals with the main subject matter you want to build a niche around. Use the keyword tool to find long tail keywords that relate to that niche and get 10-100 searches per day total. Make a list. Then check the competition of these keywords (in quotes) on Google. Scratch out any that have a lot of competition.

From the list of keywords you have left, using Godaddy's domain search, find out if the .com name is available. For example, if your keyword is: cheap laptop computers, look to see if cheaplaptopcomputers.com is available. Also check if cheap-laptop-computers.com is available. If your keyword is in your domain name, your site will be much easier to rank for.

I'll post more about keyword research later. This is some good pointers for keyword research. These steps should be done before you buy your domain name. This will save you lots of wasted time.