Once you have your main keyword phrase targeted, you'll need to do some keyword discovering to maximize it's usage. Keyword discovery
can take some time and is difficult to do without use of a tool. We highly recommend
Wordtracker for all keyword discovery. WordTracker
is an online application that keeps track of phrases that users have actually searched on and provides varying analysis reports. Perhaps
the most important aspect of
Wordtracker is that it gives you an estimate on the number of competing sites and popularity of any given
keyword phrase.
Your goal is to choose the keyword phrases that have the smallest number of competitors and the highest number of searches.
This task is difficult even using WordTracker and near impossible without it (as you're left to rely on guessing).
Wordtracker is relatively
inexpensive and we recommend giving their
free trial several tries before you even consider opening an account. This way you'll become
familiar with how to use the software and not waste valuable time learning it when you're paying for it.
Wordtracker has various options for accounts,
but we recommended signing up for a week account. It's plenty of time to discover all your
keywords and is really very inexpensive (at the time of this writing, about $24.95).
Once you've opened your
Wordtracker account it's time to think
like the users who will be seeking information that will eventually lead them to your site. In your WordTracker account (trial or full) type
in your main keyword phrase. In our case, we would search under
loan consolidation. WordTracker will return a result set of terms related to
your keyword that have been searched on by actual users.
This is not a tutorial aimed at WordTracker, so we will not go into the details here
on reading and analyzing WordTrack result reports. The basic concept we're outlining is WHERE and HOW to find your niche and highly targeted
keywords without taking a complete stab in the dark. You'll probably spend a few good hours finding keywords, refining them, and eventually
coming up with a list of a couple dozen that are all related to your vertical market (many of which you never even thought of before). The
ground work you're doing now will set the trend for all future websites you build, as well as get you on the right path THE FIRST TIME for
your current site. It's suggested you place the keywords (in order of importance) into a Excel or notepad... basically anything you can use to
save the information to a hard drive. You don't want to loose your keyword list or try to rely on memory.