Self Employed or Bust

The Importance of Picking Your Keywords

November 1, 2008 – 8:26 am

 

Assuming you’ve decided to start an optimized niche blog or any other website, for that matter, you’d be wise to pick a keyword to target. On first starting out, when the idea of being self employed was a vague dream rather than an honest pursuit, my wife and I each wanted to setup websites around our hobbies and interests. I’m an outdoor adventure nut. She’s an animal rescue fanatic. With no clue about keywords and even less clue about setting up websites, we invested countless hours and tons of blood, sweat and tears into our first sites. And we made several unfortunate mistakes; not the least of which were absolutely no efforts to target specific keywords.

 

After months of building our two websites, we wondered why the traffic didn’t flow. Why weren’t we millionaires? Why weren’t more people showing up? The amount of work put in wasn’t translating to money or visitors. More than a year later, I’m much more informed and much wiser and no why. We weren’t optimized. We didn’t target keywords. So what’s a keyword?

 

First, the term ‘keyword’ is a bit misleading. A keyword may, in fact, be a single word. It may also be a series of words. Really, though, it’s what you’re looking for when you head to Google or Yahoo. Whatever you type in to find what you’re looking for is a keyword some savvy internet entrepreneur could be targeting to attract you. The main keyword for this blog, for example, is ’self employed.’ I am slowly building this blog around that word and will gradually gain page rank on Google as the months and years go by. Why not faster? Because this isn’t the blog on which I hope to make money. It’s the blog I write in hopes of helping others make money.

 

I’m also going to mention long tail keywords. A long tail keyword is simply a longer, more targeted term for which people might search. For example, red tail hawk migration patterns. If you’re looking for that, you’re looking for some extremely specific information.

 

As you’re thinking about setting up your first blog, jot down your high level keyword. Let’s say you like cars. The word ‘cars’ is our starting point. Now, how many sites out there do you think there are about cars? Do you think that’s a smart word to start with? Do you think you could quickly move up the rankings in Google and take page one if you’re targeting that keyword? Maybe you could… but only after beating out the 694,000,000 (as of this writing) competing sites. Not likely. You can see how much you’ll be competing against by typing your keyword in the Google search field in quotes, by the way. For this search I typed in “cars”.

 

With ‘cars’ as our starting point, let’s narrow the focus. You could immediately narrow the focus a bit if you limited yourself to a particular type of car. Being a bit of a speed demon and a motor-head, you decide you’d like your first blog to focus on sports cars. Our first filtering now and we’re focused on ’sports cars.’ Hey, look at that. Already we’re down to 6,010,000 competing pages. That’s quite an improvement but still a lot of competition. We might be able to rank against that eventually but, unless you have years to kill, it’s still not a good starting point. Let’s narrow the focus even further.

 

The next keyword combination I’m going to try is “Italian sports cars.” And, bam! Just like that I’ve found a keyword that might actually be worth targeting. At 20,800 competing pages, I might actually be able to rank up there. I know 20K competing sites sounds daunting but, remember statements I’ve made in previous posts. The internet is littered with the decaying corpses of failed, unwanted, never-updated sites and blogs. Many of those 20,800 sites will fall in that category or will be poorly optimized and beatable.

 

It’s that narrowing of focus to a long tail keyword that makes optimized niche building what it is. Had you begun with just “cars” as your target, you’d spend years of link building and content writing and probably never get anywhere. By narrowing your focus, you dramatically increase the likelihood that you’ll make it to the top of Google’s first page for that term. Think of your own search habits through Google? Isn’t your inclination to hit the first item that shows up in your search? How often do you go beyond page 1, 2 or 3? See how important it is to rank well for a keyword?

 

Does that mean you can’t ever go for that broader term? No it does not. Over time, assuming you continue to grow your blog, you very likely will target other keywords. Also remember that every time Italian Sports Cars appears in your blog you are actually building some juice for each of those 3 words and every possible combination of them (Italian, Sports, Cars, Italian Sports, Italian Cars, Sports Cars). As you write about them, you’ll also find search traffic hitting your site for word combinations you never even thought about.

 

Now, don’t start jumping for joy and planning your retirement yet. On the road to self employment through optimized niche blogging, there’s a lot more to it than just picking a keyword. Heck we still have to determine if that keyword is worth targeting from an earnings perspective. At this stage, we’ve just surmised that it may be possible to rank well for. There are other variables to consider and we’ll move along with those in our next post as well as introduce you to some free tools. See you again soon.

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