Keyword Research Mistakes To Avoid

It would be nice if keyword research was an exact science, but it's not. Contrary to what marketing firms selling the latest, greatest and most expensive selection tools will tell you, this type of research is more of a form of art.

Although there might not be an exact science behind it, keyword research is critical to the success of a website, or can be. There are some very common mistakes that many make when researching their keywords. Knowing about them is half the battle in avoiding them.

The biggest keyword related mistake, hands down, is failing to see how important they are. It's a simple fact that keywords are very powerful marketing tools. They help sites earn traffic, ranking and even revenue. They can even help focus the entire theme of a site. Although hiring an expensive firm isn't required to see results, selecting goods keywords is important.

Another stumbling block is the research process itself. The improper use of keyword research tools can lead to poor keyword selection. Keyword counts, for example, are only estimates. Tools that reveal these are useful. Just keep in mind they don't reflect the total searches from Google, Yahoo and MSN. The numbers they reveal are simply estimates taken from one source. Plus, some tools report different keywords. To compensate, you might consider using multiple tools for keyword selection. Using Wordtracker and Ad Word Analyzer both is a good idea. By doing so, you can discover more keywords.

Another issue that crops up a lot is the use of only a single keyword or phrase on a site or page. The truth is it is simply much smarter to select a theme and then choose multiple words and phrases to support it. This works to boost latent semantic indexing, too. Picking niche phrases can be done with a little help from WordNet and other similar tools.

The Keyword Effectiveness Index or KEI ratio tends to be over relied on by many. This ratio is the number of times a keyword searched in relation to the number of sites that happen to rank for that word. This can help publishers get a handle on the competition. This is important, but not nearly as much as the SEO strength of the top contenders for the particular keyword. Checking SEO strength can really better reveal the competition. SeoQuake and SEO for Firefox can help here.

Failure to use keyword management tools can also be a rather big mistake. Those who are really into keyword research can rapidly come up with thousands of keywords. A tool like Ad Word Analyzer can very much help with sorting, filtering, and analyzing the results.

Poorly timed research is also a real killer for optimization. Wordtracker, for example, stores stats for the previous 90 days. This means those trying to research seasonal keywords, for example, won't get very valid results during off times.

Two other big hurdles that a lot of webmasters fumble on include selecting keywords by big price alone and even failing to implement new keywords after conducting research. Greed often comes into play when selecting keywords for a site. The fact is the lower paying keywords can pay out more over the long run since these niche and long-tail keywords don't have as much competition. They can even generate more traffic over the long haul, too.

Keyword selection is an art form that can deliver some major perks to a site. Although finding the right keywords to use can take time and effort, the payoff can be big in terms of visitors and even revenue.

Article Source: http://www.a1-optimization.com/articles

About the author: Jeff Alderson specializes in boosting traffic and profits. He is also the developer of numerous PPC and SEO tools. Jeff suggests using a keyword generator like Ad Word Analyzer to find keywords for your website.
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