Third Step:
Filtering
your keywords
Anyone
bidding on a keyword that doesn’t convert usually pulls their Ad within a
matter of days. Ads that show up on Adwords for a particular keyword will give
you a clear picture of what people searching for that particular keyword are
looking for.
If you have
ever tried to advertise a product as an affiliate on a competitors keyword,
you know how
hard it is to maintain good ranking. If we do a search on “Affiliate Project
Nutshell” you will see that nine out of ten ads are promoting Affiliate Project
Nutshell. If we type in our keyword and look at the ads being shown we can see
what people searching that term are interested in.
If you notice
that there are several products currently being advertised which are similar to
the one that we are planning on advertising then it would a good idea to target
this keyword with our article. Because chances are that it converts for
products like yours.
Google will
rank you good for sites used to create your articles, but will rank you even
better with a well established hub site. Also certain search terms such as
“poker” or “credit cards” etc. are going to be very, very, very heavy and you will have zero chance in
hell of ranking even in the top 100 searches with your articles using those
terms.
We need to
rank in the top 10 for our search terms, and we will have to carefully pick our
keywords. Too
low and we won’t get traffic, too high and we can’t compete. There are some
fairly popular terms out there that aren’t too hard to rank for and we are
going to find them. Don’t get scared it’s easy.
Here’s how:
So now you
need to blast off and land at http://www.pixelfast.com/overture and enter
the search
term in question. Once the results are in check the figure on the right which
is
the number
of times that term has been searched for
in the past month. Target the
terms which
have been searched for between 300-5000 times per month. If any
of your
keywords fall
outside that scale cross them off the list they are too competitive.
Now that we
have the search volume down, we need to ensure that the term is not too
competitive and that we are going to be able to rank on the search page. We can
guess
roughly how
competitive a term is by looking at the results that are currently in the top
ten. You only need to get it right most of the time.
Note:
In part I you
received information about wordtracker to help you discover new search terms
for your campaigns, here is an alternative method that I thought might be of
interest to you. Use these two methods in combination with each other to help
find related and focused keywords for your ads and articles.
Pay attention
to three factors:
Alexa rank, Page rank and the title of the
page. If you are a Firefox user (and you should be) you can get a free
extension called Search Status at (http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus) which will display page rank and Alexa rank automatically for every page
that you visit. This is a great time saver.
What it Page
Rank
Page rank is
Google’s way of measuring how many links are point to a particular web page. If
for your keyword all the pages in the top ten have a page rank between 0-3
that’s a good sign if the page rank is 5 or higher, that’s a bad sign.
What is Alexa
Rank
Alexa Rank
basically measures how popular a website is- and the lower the number the more
popular the site is.
If the majority
of the pages in the top ten have Alexa ranks of less than 100.000 that’s a good
sign. If there are only a few sites that have Alexa ranks of less
than 20.000 that’s a bad sign.
Last but not
least, look at the Title of each web page- do the titles include
your keyword in them??- if so chances are that web page has been “optimised”
for that keyword, that means that the webmaster is deliberately competing on
that keyword, thus making it harder to rank for that term, except in cases
where your keywords have a search volume between 300-5000, and the competition isn’t too tough on Google we have
a keyword that we can target.
Stay tuned for the next and final step.