Choosing which keyword phrases to optimize for
Wednesday, Nov 14, 2007
When you start up a new affiliate site, an essential task is to find out for which keyword phrases you should optimize your site to attract as much traffic as possible.
“"The more popular a keyword phrase is in the search engines, the more business it generates. But this also means that there will be much harder competition (...) You'll probably find it profitable to focus on intermediate keywords"”
Know your enemy
To find more keywords, you should analyze your best competitors. Search for the most evident keyword phrases and notice which sites appear on the top ten lists for these phrases. Use your SEO Tools to analyze for which key phrases they have optimized their pages.
Check their site, look at the content of their pages, under what categories they present it, analyze html titles and meta descriptions, check out their backlinks, and so on.
This will give you a good picture of what's going on in your niche. You should now have a list of key phrases, some more important, some more exotic, some with heavy competition, some that will be easier to claim for yourself.
Perform searches with the key words in your list. What do you find? What do the Google Adwords display for these search terms?
Go after the most profitable key phrases
Build an understanding for which words are the most important ones in your niche, and which ones are of intermediate importance. The more popular a keyword phrase is in the search engines, the more business it generates. But that also means that there will be much harder competition for the visitors on this search term.
As a starting affiliate, you'll probably find it most profitable to focus your energy on intermediate keywords, where you have a chance to claim a top ten position in Google. But remember, as stated above, the most important key phrases in your niche will also be the most important ones for your site in the long run.
Make plans for your site. What subject categories will you be covering? Which popular key phrases relate to these categories? Lay out a strategy for when and how you'll tackle the key words that appear to be the most promising ones.
Remember that your starting page is the most important page of the site, and you should optimize it for the most important keywords.
Create quality content
For your site to start ranking in the search engines, you'll probably need to produce fifteen to twenty pages of good, relevant content to start with.
Also, try to get a couple of backlinks from some authoritative sites in the niche - they'll speed things up with the search engines.
When the site is up, let the search engines index your site and start their ranking process. Once the site has been noticed by the search engine spiders, you can start your regular updating routine and publish a couple of new pages each day, or each week, to prove that the site is alive and interesting for visitors.
By building a site with high quality content, you'll automatically catch the "long tail" of search phrases that any niche entails. So, rather than focusing your efforts on the easy but unprofitable long tail search phrases, just let them come along automatically as you focus on optmizing more important keywords.
Search engines are getting more and more refined. Nowadays they'll even track the "success" for visitors that they send to your site. If the visitors tend to stay on your site rather than coming straight back to the search page, this is a sign that your site matched what they were searching for, and the ranking of your site will profit from this.
The value of good landing pages
When you have chosen a number of keywords to optimize for, you need to create landing pages for each of them. The purpose of a landing page is to "take care" of visitors that come in from the search engines. You need to give them what they were looking for as they supplied their search term, and you need to make them click through to your merchants.
If you can deliver this, you'll be on your way to making a living by guiding web visitors!
/Sarl Dunnis
