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Monthly archive of 29. June 2008

Proper keyword research without spending money

Sunday, den 29. June 2008

We often say the keyword research is the most important part of webpage development. However, if you want to do proper keyword research, you would need to pay subscription fees. For example, Wordtracker would charge you something around $59/month or $329/year. For a blogger who is not earning enough from his or her blog, this amount may seem very expensive.

Another big problem is that, for a blogger keyword research is a continuous process if they want to get enough visitors to their blog (ideally before publishing any post, you must do some keyword research - do you?). Especially, if you are looking to target keyword long tail, you must subscribe to one of them (unless you are experienced enough to guess it right.). And thus there is no other option but going for the yearly subscription to save some $$ in the long run.

But is there any other way to keyword research?

There are some free keyword research tools in the web. Though all of them are free, you may not expect complete result from a free account except from Google AdWords (even though Google AdWords is not primarily a keyword research tool, it is close enough to help you).

So how do you start?

At the very beginning do guess some keyword on the topic of your blog post. Prepare a small list - it is better to be generic. For example, if you are writing a post on proper keyword research for bloggers, “keyword research” or “free keyword research” should be taken as generic keywords. Now use those free tools to find out other variations of these keywords that your target audience is actually using.

So do you think that you have got all the keywords you want?

Ok, let’s go a bit deeper - now use these keywords to search in Google (.com or .co.uk or .com.au - depending on your target market) and find out how many people are targeting these keywords. You can also go for exact search (use the keywords in the “”) to know how many people are using that exact key phrase. This would give you a lot of idea on your competition.

Now you are ready to get your targeted phrases. Good key phrases should have more searches and less competition.

You can also try using Google Suggest or Google Trends if you need something more.

Trust me; the time you are spending in the process is worth it. And if you are writing some post as a linkbait, you simply can’t afford to ignore it.

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