How to find keywords that will send traffic to your site.

Now you have a list of keywords, you need to understand how much traffic these keywords receive in Google. Without search traffic data, you could end up targeting keywords with zero searches. Armed with the right knowledge, you can target keywords with hundreds or even thousands of potential visitors every month.

How to generate a massive list of keywords.

There are many ways to skin a cat. The same is true for finding the right keywords. Before you can find keywords with loads of traffic in Google, you must first develop a list of potential keywords relevant to your business. Relevance is vital. If you spend your time trying to cast too wide a net, you can end up targeting keywords irrelevant to your audience. For example, if you are an online football jacket retailer in the United States, examples of relevant keywords might be: Buy football jackets Buy football jackets online Online football jackets store USA Irrelevant keywords might be: Football jacket photos How to make your own football jacket Football jacket manufacturers How to design a football jacket You can see how the first pool of keywords are more relevant to the target audience of football jacket retailers, and the second pool of keywords are related but unlikely to lead to customers. Keeping relevance in mind, you must develop a list of potential keyword combinations to use as a resource, so you can then go and uncover the best keywords with a decent amount of traffic each month in Google. Following are some powerful strategies you can use to help with generating this list.
1. Steal keywords from competitors.
If you're feeling sneaky, you can let your competitors do the heavy lifting for you and snatch up keywords from their sites. There are many tools out there created for this sole purpose. A simple and free tool is the SEOBook Keyword Analyzer. If you enter a page into this tool within seconds it will scrape a list of the keywords your competitor has optimized into their page. You can then use this to bulk out your keyword list. SEOBook Keyword Analyzer http://babblecase.com/2rP/ While the SEOBook Keyword Analyzer is a great, simple tool for revealing the keywords your competitors have optimized into the page, another powerful tool is SEMrush’s Domain Analytics Organic Research Tool. This tool estimates the keywords that are sending the largest amount of traffic to your competitors’websites. The estimates are reasonably accurate and can be a valuable resource for bulking out your keyword list. While SEMrush’s insights are powerful, they do come at a cost. You can preview the first 10-keywords for free, but if you want more data its plans start at $ 69.95 per month for pro users. SEMrush Domain Analytics http://babblecase.com/2rR
2. Brainstorm your own master list.
Assuming competitors have been thorough with their research isn't always the best strategy. By brainstorming combinations of keywords, you can generate a giant list of potential keywords. To do this, sketch out a grid of words your target customer might use. Split the words into different prefixes and suffixes . Next up, combine them into one giant list using the free Mergewords tool. With this strategy you can quickly and easily build up a massive list of relevant keywords.
Mergewords
http://babblecase.com/2rX
Prefix
- buy
- where do I buy Middle word
- NFL jerseys
- NFL uniforms
- NFL jackets Suffixes
- online Combined keywords
- NFL jerseys
- NFL jerseys online
- NFL uniforms
- NFL uniforms online
- NFL jackets
- NFL jackets online
- buy NFL jerseys
- buy NFL jerseys online
- buy NFL uniforms
- buy NFL uniforms online
- buy NFL jackets
- buy NFL jackets online
- where do I buy NFL jerseys
- where do I buy NFL jerseys online
- where do I buy NFL uniforms
- where do I buy NFL uniforms online
- where do I buy NFL jackets
- where do I buy NFL jackets online
- NFL jerseys
- NFL jerseys online
- NFL uniforms
- NFL uniforms online
- NFL jackets
- NFL jackets online

Keyword research. The most important step of SEO

Why is keyword research so important?
Keyword research is the most important step of every SEO project for two reasons:
1. If you rank your site highly for the wrong keywords, you can end up spending lots of time and effort, only to discover the keywords you have targeted doesn't receive any traffic.
2. If you haven't investigated the competitiveness of your keywords, you can end up investing lots of time and effort into a particular keyword, only to find it is far too competitive to rank, even on the first page. These two pitfalls are often the ultimate decider on how successful any SEO project is. This chapter will cover how to avoid these pitfalls and how to find the best keywords. First, we must define what a keyword is.
What exactly is a keyword?
If you are an SEO newbie, you may be wondering—what is a keyword? A keyword is any phrase you would like your site to rank for in Google's search results. A keyword can be a single word, or a keyword can also be a combination of words. If you are trying to target a single word, lookout! You will have your work cut out for you. Single word keywords are extremely competitive, and difficult to rank highly for in the search results. Here’s some different kinds of keywords: Head-term keywords: keywords with one to two words, i.e. classic movies. Long-tail keywords: keywords with three or more phrases, i.e. classic Akira Kurosawa movies. Navigational keywords: keywords used to locate a particular brand or website. Examples would be Facebook, YouTube or Gmail. Informational keywords: keywords used to discover on a particular topic. This includes keywords beginning with “how to…”or “what are the best...”Transactional keywords: keywords entered into Google by customers wanting to complete a commercial action, i.e. buy jackets online. In most cases, targeting head-term or navigational keywords for other brands is competitive and not worth the time or effort. Despite their high traffic numbers, they will generally not lead to any sales. On the other hand, long-tail, informational and transactional keywords are good keywords for most SEO projects. They will lead to more customers.

How to stay ahead of Google’s updates

Every now and then, Google releases a significant update to their algorithm, which can have a massive impact on businesses from any industry. To hone your SEO chops and make sure your site doesn't fall into Google's bad books, it's important to stay up-to-date with Google’s updates as they are released. Fortunately, almost every time a major update is released, those updates are reported on by the entire SEO community and often publicly discussed and confirmed by Google staff. A long extended history of Google’s updates would fill this entire book, but with the resources below, you can stay abreast of new Google updates as they are rolled out. This is essential knowledge for anyone practicing SEO, at a beginner or an advanced level. You can even keep your ear to the ground with these sources and often be forewarned of future updates. Google Updates by Search Engine Round Table http://babblecase.com/2qr Search Engine Round Table is one of the industry’s leading blogs on SEO. At the page above, you can browse all of the latest articles on Google updates by a leading authority on the topic. Moz Blog http://babblecase.com/2qu blog The Moz blog is mentioned several times in this book and for good reason—it’s pretty much the leading authority blog on all things SEO, and if there’s an impending update Google have hinted at, you will catch wind of it here.

How Google ranks sites now— Google’s top-10 ranking factors revealed

You may have wondered if you can find out the exact factors Google uses in their algorithm. Fortunately, there are a handful of industry leaders who have figured it out, and regularly publish their findings on the Internet. With these publications you can get a working knowledge of what factors Google uses to rank sites. These surveys are typically updated every second year, but these factors don’t change often, so you can use them to your advantage by knowing which areas to focus on. A short list of some of the strongest factors associated with high search rankings: - Relevant keywords on the page. - Keyword in internal links. - User signals (click-through-rate, time-on-site, bounce-rate). - Domain SEO visibility (how strong the domain is in terms of links and authority). - Search volume of domain name. - Total number of backlinks. - Total number of referring domains (unique sites linking to your site). - Google + social media activity. - Facebook social media activity. If your competitors’have more of the above features than yours, then it’s likely they will rank higher than you. If you have more of the above features than competitors, then it is likely you will rank higher than your competitors. Combine this knowledge with an understanding of the recent Google updates covered in later sections, and you will know what it takes to achieve top rankings. The above factors are from the Search Metrics Google Ranking Factors study released in 2015. The Search Metrics study is an in-depth look at the high-ranking factors in Google. If you want a deeper look, you can browse the full report by visiting the link below. Search Metrics: Google Ranking Factors US http://babblecase.com/2qf  Another well-known authority on the SEO industry, called Moz (previously SEOmoz), release a survey every two years, combining survey data from world-leading SEOs, and a very detailed analysis of how Google functions today. Moz also publish this information for free. Moz Ranking Factors Survey  http://babblecase.com/2qY

Three powerful SEO strategies explained

Google has evolved considerably from its humble origins in 1993. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, once reported that Google considered over 200 factors to determine which sites rank higher in the results. Today, Google has well over 200 factors. Google assesses how many links are pointing to your site, how trustworthy these linking sites are, how many social mentions your brand has, how relevant your page is, how old your site is, how fast your site loads…and the list goes on. Does this mean it's impossible or difficult to get top rankings in Google? Nope. In fact, you can have the advantage. Google’s algorithm is complex, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand how it works. In fact, it can be ridiculously simple if you remember just three principles. With these three principles you can determine why one site ranks higher than another, or discover what you have to do to push your site higher than a competitor. These three principles summarize what Google are focusing on in their algorithm now, and are the most powerful strategies SEO professionals are using to their advantage to gain rankings. The three key principles are: Trust, Authority and Relevance.
1.Trust is at the very core of Google’s major changes and updates the past several years. Google wants to keep poor-quality, untrustworthy sites out of the search results, and keep high-quality, legit sites at the top. If your site has high-quality content and backlinks from reputable sources, your site is more likely to be considered a trustworthy source, and more likely to rank higher in the search results.
2. Authority Previously the most popular SEO strategy, authority is still powerful, but now best used in tandem with the other two principles. Authority is your site’s overall strength in your market. Authority is almost a numbers game, for example: if your site has one thousand social media followers and backlinks, and your competitors only have fifty social media followers and backlinks, you’re probably going to rank higher.
3. Relevance. Google looks at the contextual relevance of a site and rewards relevant sites with higher rankings. This levels the playing field a bit, and might explain why a niche site or local business can often rank higher than a Wikipedia article. You can use this to your advantage by bulking out the content of your site with relevant content, and use the on-page SEO techniques described in later chapters to give Google a nudge to see that your site is relevant to your market. You can rank higher with less links by focusing on building links from relevant sites. Increasing relevance like this is a powerful strategy and can lead to high rankings in competitive areas.

Google updates and how to survive them

Fast-forward 15 years and ranking in Google has become extremely competitive and considerably more complex. Simply put, everybody wants to be in Google. Google is fighting to keep its search engine relevant and must constantly evolve to continue delivering relevant results to users. This hasn't been without its challenges. Just like keyword stuffing, webmasters eventually clued onto another way of gaming the system by having the most anchor text pointing to the page. If you are not familiar with this term, anchor text is the text contained in external links pointing to a page. This created another loophole exploited by spammers. In many cases, well-meaning marketers and business owners used this tactic to achieve high rankings in the search results. Along came a new Google update in 2012, this time called Penguin. Google's Penguin update punished sites with suspicious amounts of links with the same anchor text pointing to a page, by completely delisting sites from the search results. Many businesses that relied on search engine traffic lost all of their sales literally overnight, just because Google believed sites with hundreds of links containing just one phrase didn't acquire those links naturally. Google believed this was a solid indicator the site owner could be gaming the system. If you find these changes alarming, don't. How to recover from these changes, or to prevent being penalized by new updates, is covered in later chapters. In the short history of Google's major updates, we can discover two powerful lessons for achieving top rankings in Google. 1. If you want to stay at the top of Google, never rely on one tactic.
2. Always ensure your search engine strategies rely on SEO best practices.