How To Find Great Keywords

Finding just the right keyword is a combination of things.

- Monthly Traffic and Keyword Use
- Competition (The next page of this training explains how to find the exact number of competition.)
- Article Power

Monthly Traffic and Keyword Use

The minimum amount of traffic a keyword should have depends on it's use. If you are choosing one to use as a domain name, the keyword should have more monthly searches than one you intend to use for a post on your blog or for Street Articles.

- Keywords for Domains = minimum 1000 monthly searches
- Keyword for Articles = minimum 250 monthly searches
- Secondary keywords used throughout your article = minimum 50 monthly searches

This is the important thing to remember. Don't use your keyword too many times. Write your articles naturally so that the reader can enjoy it. If the reader does not enjoy it, they will not read it. It makes no difference how many people see it if no one reads and shares it.

Competition

I don't tend to bother with words that have more than 1000 competition regardless of how many searches it get's.

The lower the competition, the better you will rank. I will use anything that has less than 100 competitions because I know I am sure to get first page results. It may only get ten monthly searches but if I know it's ten guaranteed, sure I will use it.

That is ten each month. So, one article with that keyword and I can count on roughly 120 views per year.

Article Power

This refers to how useful the key phrase would be as the title of an article. For instance, "keyword research search" get's around 300 monthly searches and only has about 500 competition but it's a horrible keyword from a human perspective. The most important thing is the reader; that trumps all else.

Now that you have an idea of the kind of keyword you're looking for, let me show you a real easy way to find some great words.

Of course, this depends on your niche. Let's choose the knife sharpening niche. I would start out with the term "Knife Sharpening." This phrase is a bit broad and has high competition but let's take it one step further.

Let's plug in the term, "How to sharpen a knife." As you can see, the results are just what we are looking for - low competition and very high search volume.

This is where so many people stop and that is a mistake. As I mentioned earlier, you don't wan't to put all of your eggs in one basket. What Google shows you all of the closely related searches as well. You will want to find one main keyword to use as the title of your article and then try to use as many of the other qualifying words that they give you as well. This way your article will grab traffic from all of these sources. Just make sure you fit them in naturally, don't stuff them!

You can just keep going. Try terms like, "How to sharpen knives" or "Knife sharpening methods" and so on. This is like a treasure hunt in a way. You just have to keep looking until you find the right words.

Next Page: Exactly How Much Competition Is There?

Please read the next page to learn how to find the exact number of competition