Update: I knew I should have slept first before posting this, I’ve edited out the rookie HTML mistakes now.

In line with my previous post about trying to make this blog more for the noobs, I’ve written a little guide on how to do some basic keyword and competition research.

This is all about natural, organic search engine results page rankings, and how to make sure you are targeting the right keywords before you start to build links.

There’s a chance that I’ll have missed out some parts of the research process due to either lack of sleep or the fact that I don’t do them myself. If that’s the case, feel free to leave some feedback in the comments section underneath the post.

Research Keywords That Get Traffic

This might seem a little obvious to some, but I can assure you that there are people out there who target keywords based on whatever they feel like.

“My blog’s all about gardening, let’s target landscaping help because I saw a nice article on the internet about landscaping”.

What I’m trying to say is that some people don’t put any rational thought into the keywords they choose to target. Or they think they are thinking rationally but there thoughts aren’t based on any quantifiable data.

If you are targeting a keyword, it has to get traffic. Otherwise why bother. If no one is searching for landscaping help there would be no point in our imaginary friend with the gardening blog from targeting it.

I hope I’ve hammered home this point quite clearly. The keywords you target better damn well get traffic.

Which Keywords Get Traffic?

There are tools both paid and free which can help you with this. There are only two tools I use for organic SEO research.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool

Many people swear by the Google Keyword Tool alone, and would quite easily shun the SEOBook tool. Most other keyword tools are powered by the Google Keyword Tool anyway, even SEOBook’s tool pulls some of its results from there.

However, I like the way you can click on a keyword to get even more relevant suggestions. Perhaps the same functionality is available in the Google Keyword Tool, but I like the way SEOBook handles it so I use it just as much.

Anyone can rank for a keyword that doesn’t get traffic, but what would be the point? For proof of this take a look at this post by Glowleaf: Make Monies Online Using Your Boobs.

He managed to get that post to rank for that exact phrase just by doing a little bit of on-page SEO and some social bookmarking. Take a look on Google and you’ll see that he’s got the number one ranking for that term.

Check Out the Competition

Who are the competition? They are the sites that are currently ranking for the keywords you’re considering targeting.

The aim of this section is to research how strong the competition is in terms of ranking for the specific keywords you are targeting. Whether you can beat the competition or not is usually down to your own skill level, so as a beginner you should try and go for the longtails.

A longtail keyword is a phrase that usually has at least 2 or 3 words in it, and it’s much more targeted and less general. They also have less searches per day than other keywords.

Take gardening advice for example. According to SEOBook it gets 58 searches per day from Google alone. Check it out in Google:

Another thing to note here is that this is a Google US search. I live in the UK, and the top 3 results here are actually .co.uk domains, completely different to the US results. I’m showing the US results because most of you readers are from the US.

How Does Google Rank Sites?

In order for you to work out if these sites are weak competition or not, you need to know how Google decides which sites to rank for which keyword.

There are many, many people out there on various forums that will try and give you advice or tell you what works and what doesn’t - 90% of them have no idea what they’re talking about.

You see, people like to come across as SEO experts and so they spout out all this stuff to make SEO sound confusing and technical. While I’m not saying that it’s as easy as pie, I am saying it certainly isn’t as complicated as a lot of people make out.

There are a few main areas that Google looks at when deciding where to rank a site:

1. Title tags
2. Header tags
3. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)
4. Backlinks

Technically that’s incorrect, because Google looks at a whole range of things, hundreds in fact. But look at it this way, as a beginner you’ll want to concentrate on the basics.

Title Tags

The title tags appear near the top of the HTML of a page like this:

<TITLE>This is my title, I am so cool.</TITLE>

This text is then interpreted by the browser and placed right at the top, above the page in the little (usually blue) part of the browser. Google looks at what is in those tags and gets an idea about what your site should rank for.

Header Tags

Exactly the same as title tags, they appear in the HTML like so:

<H1>Hey, look at me, I’m a Heading One tag</H1>

<H4>STFU, I’m a Heading Four tag and I’m gonna kick your ass</H4>

Google interprets these heading/header tags as important and so decides that the content of them must have something to do with what your page is about, and therefore should be something to do with what the page should rank for.

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)

Google isn’t stupid, they aren’t just going to rank your page in their index for the term gardening advice just because you used that keyword on the page.

They’ll also take into consideration similar words that are used to see if you are really talking about gardening advice. It’s kind of hard to understand, but the way I look at LSI is like this: Google can tell if you are really writing about a subject or if you are trying to pretend to write about a subject.

That’s the basics of LSI, and it can be used to manipulate Google in a blackhat way, but for now just remember that they can for the most part detect what you are actually writing about.

Backlinks

Now we’re talking! This is one of the biggest factors that Google will use to help determine what keywords your site should rank for. A backlink is simply a link back to your page.

The more backlinks you have, the more popular your site must be, and so more likely to rank on Google.

Some backlinks are worth more than others, and yet again there are a number of factors that determine the value. A few of them are as follows:

Anchor text: the words used to describe the link.

<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/tasty-link.php>This is my anchor text and I reign supreme</a>

Obviously, if your anchor text matches the keywords you’re targeting, that’s a good thing.

Page Rank: the bigger the page rank (PR) of the page that the backlink is on, the more value it passes on to the page it links to.

No-follow: if the link has the no-follow attribute applied to it then the search engines do not apply any relevance to the link. That doesn’t mean that they won’t have a look at the site, and add it to their index if it isn’t already in, but it won’t count the link as a relevant backlink.

In other words, no-followed links severely reduce the power of the link that’s being given. No-followed links look like this:

<a href=”http://www.mysite.com/tasty-link.php rel=”nofollow”>I’m the anchor text</a>

Competition Research

Now you know what Google uses to rank a site, you should check out the competition and see if they’re really strong in those areas we looked at before.

It’s important to remember that we’re looking at this from a beginner’s standpoint, so there will always be more to this than what I’m writing here. But for taking out the competition and dominating some longtail keywords, what I’m going to say will be more than enough.

We’re going to take a look at the second site down from our gardening advice search on Google.

I’ve turned on the SEOQuake addon for Firefox, that’s what you can see underneath the result. The first thing you notice is that the page is a Page Rank 5, which is pretty good. Next up you’ll see it has 65 backlinks according to Yahoo.

It’s important to know the backlinks to this particular page and not the whole domain, because it’s this page we are trying to outrank and not the whole site. This gets harder when the competition isn’t a sub-page of a site, but it’s homepage.

If this happens you’ll see lots of links showing up to that specific page, but in it there will be a lot more that aren’t anything to do with your specific longtail keywords. I always find it easier checking out a sub-page than a homepage.

Does the page in our example use the target keywords in the title? For the most part yes, although it could be optimised a little more for it if they wanted but I imagine they have bigger keywords to fry. If the site didn’t target your keywords in the title, that would be a good thing because you’d have a better chance at taking over them in the SERPs.

Having a look over the page, can you see the keywords being used on the page at all, specifically in heading tags etc. If not then that’s another plus one for us.

Next we’d check out the backlinks for that page. We already know that it has 65 from SEOQuake, but we need more information such as what’s the Page Rank of those backlinks. The simplest (and most tedious) way would be to check out each of those backlinks in Yahoo Site Explorer.

Search the HTML code of each site looking for the backlink, and then check out the anchor text. This can be quite time consuming but it’s worth it in the end. If you’re using the Search Status add on for Firefox you should also be able to see the Page Rank of each site that you check out as well, so you get an idea of how valuable each backlink is.

How Tough Is The Competition?

That’s a question that only experience can really answer. There are no hard and fast values here, it’s all down to your own SEO skill. Knowing how effective your competition’s SEO work is takes you one step closer to beating them with your own link building campaigns.

Common sense tells us that if they have lots of high PR backlinks with relevant anchor text, that they are going to be harder to beat than someone with just a handful of low-quality non-targeted backlinks.

Where To Go From Here

This is just a taster of keyword and competition research from a beginner’s perspective. There’s more to look into, but you need to learn to walk before you can run.

I’d recommend trying to get a small site ranking for some really easy longtails at first, and once you can do that start moving up the levels until you eventually start to take on the big boys.

If you have any questions please post them in the comments below.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 1:48 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.