Is your keyword research in depth enough?

The fifth part of 11 things to consider before you start blogging talks about keyword research and making sure you have applied enough time to your keyword research before you start blogging to ensure you  have found the right keywords.

One of the biggest mistakes I made before I started blogging was not doing enough in depth keyword research to find the ultimate keywords which over time would benefit my blog, bringing in the most targeted traffic from the search engines. The effects of not performing the right amount of keyword research and in some cases just using my own assumption that a keyword would bring in traffic meant I targeted the wrong keywords for several months and in SEO time is everything. As it takes a lot of time and effort to rank highly for your keywords, the time I spent targeting the wrong keywords will never be recoupreated although I have now learnt my lesson.

However this does not stop you making the same mistake although I hope this article might. When your first considering starting a blog, if you are anything like me you just want to jump straight in to it. No planning no research, nothing just jump straight in head first with out deciding anything. This is basically what I did when I first started this blog, I never even chose the domain name it was one that I had from when I was trying out domain parking a couple of months earlier (this will be in another article). I didn’t think about blogging formats or competition I just jumped right in. I was unprepared, misguided and inexperienced this is why I want to share what I have learnt from my past year blogging with you, so that you don’t make the same mistakes I did.

The reason you need to spend enough time performing keyword research is because this will have major effects on your traffic levels in the long term. Not only this but when your developing your blog you will have several places on your blog where you will need to enter text and in this text you will want to add your keywords. As well as this your keywords will be spread throughout all of your articles no matter what catergory or niche they are written for you will have keywords for each and every topic covered on your blog. Keywords are one of the first things you should have ready for your blog and for each topic you should have seperate keywords 4-5 keywords per topic and then another 4-5 per sub topic.

An example of keyword research that is not in depth enough is:

Lets say you are developing a blog in the internet marketing field. Your looking for 4 keywords to place on your home page in the title, meta tags and several other places. You do some keyword research using your favourite keyword research tool and find that the keyword “internet marketing” has 5,000 searches a day, so you think wow if I can rank for that I am going to get loads of traffic and I can then monetize that traffic and I ll be rich. If only it worked like this we would all be rich.

Instead you don’t delve in any deeper and you just go straight ahead and add “internet marketing” as your first keyword for your website. Instead of performing more keyword research, finding out more about the keyword “internet marketing” and what other relevant keywords you can find, you stick with this one.

Lets say you repeat this process four more times to give you 4 keywords overall for your home page, you do a little bit of on page SEO and thats it. Many months later after you have read my blog for several weeks as well as other blogs, you’ve picked up a lot more knowledge about SEO and Internet marketing and you have become more experienced in the field of blogging. You take a look at where you rank for the term and realise your not even in the top 10 million and wonder why.

Well with a term like that you won’t rank in the top 100 not even the top 1,000 for many years. SEO takes time and with a keyword like “internet marketing” it will take years to get ranked highly for no matter what you do.

So when your performing your keyword research don’t just go with the obvious keywords such as “Internet marketing”, “SEO” and “Blogging”. Not only are these keywords extremely hard to rank for, they will also take years to rank for as well as having a high amount of competition. Instead delve deeper in to your keyword research to find relevant keywords which are related to your niche, whether it be “Internet marketing” or “Weight loss” and seek to find those keywords with little to no competition but a high amount of daily searches.

Overall before you start your blogging career you want your keywords chosen and ready, for a brand new blog I would advise you not to pick keywords with more than 1,000,000 search results. I myself don’t pick many keywords with over 1,000,000 search results still but thats mainly to do with the market I am trying to rank for.

Here are some useful resources that may help you in performing your keyword research.

My All in one Keyword research eBook and All in one SEO is available when you subscribe to my blog, they are sent straight to your email inbox with a link to download them. With over 10,000 words in total they are well worth it.

Subscribe to my blog here.

Keyword Research Tools:

Wordze

Wordtracker

Keyword Elite

SEO Elite

I hope you enjoyed this article, have you ever had any blogging mistake experiences since starting your blogging career?

Enjoyed this, why not download the 11 part series as an E Book at 73 pages long I am sure you will find it helpful. Subscribe and download right here.

Similar Posts:

• What is keyword research
• Keyword Research – The First Steps to Article Marketing
• Why you should pay for keyword tools