Keyword Research for Niche Websites
Keyword research is one of the most overlooked aspects of building niche websites, perhaps because most people have no idea how to research keywords or how to use the results of their research.
Building web pages optimized for only one keyword or phrase is past history. The search engines have evolved past that point and now rank pages based on the relationship between the phrases used on a page. They also analyze the relationship between these phrases and those used throughout your entire website. They go a step further and analyze the relationship between the phrases used on your site and those used on the web pages you link to and those which link to you.
That is not to say you shouldn’t optimize a page for a particular keyword or phrase, rather you should optimize a page for more than one keyword phrase. Each page should contain a primary keyword phrase which is backed up by a number of secondary similar related phrases (these secondary phrases could be links to other pages on your site which are optimized for that particular phrase).
This is good news because it makes you build web pages which are not only relevant to the theme of your website but which are more readable than those stuffed with multiple occurrences of the same keyword or phrase!
When researching keywords, it’s a good thing to bear in mind that up to 40% of the phrases used by search engine users cannot be discovered using keyword research tools. These are “one time” phrases (which tend to be highly targeted search phrases) and the best place to find them is in your website stats (for example in your website’s AWStats)…
So how do you go about finding the other 60 percent?
Keyword research tools draw their information from different databases, so the research data will vary. Digital Point offers a free keyword research tool which displays data from WordTracker (the free version) and Overture (no longer supported so the results will slowly deteriorate). Even with these limitations, the Digital Point keyword tool will give you enough data to get started.
The basic idea is to find keyword phrases which are searched for fairly often but which have low competition. The Digital Point utility will only give you the number of daily searches, so you have to save those keyword phrases and run them through a different system to find the amount of competition.
One way is to do this manually and enter the phrase enclosed in “” into the search engine - For example you could type “affiliate marketing” into the search engine.
This returned 1,380,000 competing pages in Google, but this is not true competition. The number returned is only the number of pages that use the phrase somewhere on the webpage. It does not tell you whether the pages are optimized for the phrase. To get that information you need to use these attributes:
intitle:”affiliate marketing” - this returned 405,000 competing pages which use the term ‘affiliate marketing’ in the webpage title.
inurl:”affiliate marketing” - this returned 123,000 competing pages which use the term ‘affiliate marketing’ in the webpage url.
inanchor:”affiliate marketing” - this returned 168,000 competing pages which use the term ‘affiliate marketing’ in the anchor text for a link somewhere on the page.
Using all three together in Google returned 41,900 pages optimized with the term ‘affiliate marketing’ which used the phrase in the webpage title, the webpage url and in the anchor text of a link or links somewhere on the page.
When conducting your own research, go through each keyword phrase and find its true competition and enter the details in a spreadsheet. Once you have built up sizable list it’s time to find suitable secondary phrases.
Use the Google Adwords keyword tool and enter your primary keyword into the search box. Make sure “Use synonyms” is checked and hit the “Get More Keywords” button. A list of keyword phrases will be returned which Google thinks are related to your primary keyword phrase. Select the ones which are the most relevant to your webpage theme and use them in the webpage article content.
It is also a good idea to include one or two of the keyword phrases from your initial research in links to pages optimized for those phrases. Over time you will build a website containing web pages using phrases which the search engines (Google in particular) deem highly relevant and inter-related. Not only that, your website visitors will be able to find related articles through the links in each individual webpage. It’s a true win-win situation!
Tags: keyword research, keyword tool, keywords, niche websites, search engine optimization, SEORelated Posts
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