As a copywriter, I get a lot of my work from SEO companies that need copy for their clients. Typically, they’ll send me an outline of what pages they need and which keywords need to be on each page. It’s then my job to create great sales copy while targeting the keywords per their instructions. Simple enough, right?

Well, most times it is. But sometimes, I’m asked to target keywords that are grammatically incorrect. For example, on one SEO project I’m working on now for a fashion company, there are keywords like “woman apparel” and “women fashion clothes.” In the past, I remember working on a real estate website where there was a keyword along the lines of “new homes real estate Houston.” Try using that naturally in your copy.

I’m a firm believer that SEO should never trump common sense and usability. Yes, it’s important that your copy is optimized and that you target the most profitable keywords, but there has to be a compromise. If a keyword just isn’t natural or it’s incorrect grammatically, you shouldn’t try to force it into your copy.

Think about it from a customer’s perspective. If you were a customer and you came across a website with really awkward content and lots of grammatically incorrect phrases, would you trust them? Would you feel comfortable giving them your business?

I know I wouldn’t. I’d be very suspicious that it was some sort of scam or something.

So what’s the solution?

In some cases, you may be able to add a “stop word” into the keyword to make it correct. For example, let’s say you’re targeting the phrase “new homes Houston.” If you add the word “in” into the keyword, you can make it “new homes in Houston”, a keyword that’s much more natural sounding. A few stop words that can typically be added without throwing off the keyword include “and”, “the”, “of”, and “in”.

The other solution is to not use awkward keywords in your website copy, but to still target them with your linkbuilding efforts. After all, links play a much bigger role in determining search rankings than your on-site copy. So, whenever you can get away with it, use those awkward keywords on offsite links you’re getting. This way, you can still target those keywords without it reflecting poorly on your brand.

What do you do whenever there’s a profitable keyword that’s grammatically incorrect?

My head literally had only hit the pillow for about 30 seconds before I re-realized this thought again. Second place is truly the first loser. And I came to realize that more than ever just a few moments ago. My son lost is cell phone in the snow last week and it stopped working. What I should do is probably punish him and not purchase a new phone, but because I am a common idiot father, I am going to replace his phone with something even better.

So, I logged into my AT&T account and like always, they offer an array of free add-on phones for my family plan. Many of these phones were actually pretty cool. One of the phones that I thought was nice was the Motorola Karma. I can get this phone free. But at any rate, in the process of reviewing these various phones, I decided to jump over to YouTube to see if there were any reviews.

Here’s the part where I re-realized that “second place is the first loser.” When I was doing my searches for these various phones, I felt very strong at clicking the first result. What’s crazy about this situation is that many hours later — once again, head crashed on pillow only 30 seconds — I was able to fully understand the power of ranking #1 for something.

In the case with the YouTube videos, I was clearly able to see the view count of each video on the search result page. In a few cases, the second and third result had more views and in fact seemed even more relevant than the #1 listing. Yet, what did I do? You guessed it… I clicked on the first result and watched that video. Reflecting back on why I did this, I remember saying to myself, “Well… if YouTube thinks this one should be #1, then that’s the video I need to watch to get the best review of this particular phone.”

Was that true? Well, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the fact that I clicked on the #1 result, and so do most people. So ultimately, the key to success is ranking #1. And this helps another point I have made many times before in the past. And that it is better to rank #1 for a keyword that only gets 100 hits per day than to rank on page two for a keyword that gets 10,000. No one looks at page two on Google. Not many people even look at the bottom first ten results.

Ranking #1 is the key. So that being said… when it comes to doing keyword research, or targeting various phrases, etc… remember to choose keywords, titles, and phrases that you feel you have the most chance at ranking number #1. Anything below that are simply losers…

In my previous article about teaching how to research and target keywords, I explained about the importance of targeting keywords that generate qualified traffic. Now that you have an understanding of why it’s important to rank for relevant keywords as opposed to focusing on scoring tons of traffic, let’s take a closer look at two programs offered by Google that can help you drill down and find keywords that you can rank for on your site.

Keep in mind, it’s important for you to have some kind of web publishing system on your site, such as a blog, and someone who is able to write and publish content on it. For more details about this, I suggest reading my article that explains why a blog is important for SEO. That said, the two programs that we’ll take a closer look at are called Google AdWords Keyword Tool and Google Wonder Wheel.

As mentioned prior, the Google Wonder Wheel an amazing and free service that allows you to easily drill down into discovering relevant longtail keywords based off very popular and competitive ones. It’s handy to use this program so that you can gather a list of keywords that will potentially be used.

The next program, Google AdWords Keyword Tool, is used to further research the list of keywords generated from Google Wonder Wheel. Using this program, you can get a general idea of the amount of traffic and level of competition a keyword has.

Using Google AdWords Keyword Tool gives you the ability to screen your preliminary list of keywords so that you can remove ones that prove to be too competitive or receive far less traffic than desired. Also, Google AdWords Keyword Tool works as a micro keyword finder as well. Just like Google Wonder Wheel, you’ll find that the keyword tool does a great job generating relevant keywords as well.

Stay tuned because in the next few days I will continue explaining more about researching and targeting keywords for search engine marketing. Next, I will show you how to study the search results page to determine whether it’s possible to easily rank on it.

Learning how to research and target keywords for search engine marketing is a valuable skill to learn. Ranking for certain keywords and phrases in search engines can deliver more traffic to your site than you can shake a stick at. But also, it isn’t always about the quantity of traffic.

In most cases, it’s about the quality of the traffic. And that is one of the most common things I believe people mistake about SEM and even SEO. In my opinion, I would rather have 100 super qualified visitors to my site per month rather than 10,000 unqualified visitors. That said, of course you can easily rank for many different keywords and phrases; however, if you own a site that sells kitchen appliances in Dallas Texas. Is there really any reason to try to rank for the search term, kitchen appliances in Alaska?

In other words, it’s relatively easy to rank for keywords and phrases that yield a lot of traffic. But, this is useless traffic that only puts a burden on your server and consumes your bandwidth. Not only is this traffic not going to convert, but eventually search engines will catch on to the misuse of keyword targeting and derank the listings and possibly the entire site.

The best thing a site owner can do is pick out relevant keywords and phrases that will deliver high quality traffic and qualified leads towards conversion or call to action. With that, here is a simple process you can follow that will help you drill down towards finding keywords that’ll work for you.

The first thing I do is write down ten primary keywords, such as: Cars, Doctor, Computer, House, Keyboard, Bed, Door, Plants, etc. Once I have a list of primary keywords that are relevant to the topic of my site, I then start researching sub-topics, or as many people call it, Longtail Keyword Phrases. There’s quite a few programs that can help you do this. One is a program I have been using for a couple years called Google AdWords Keyword Tool. The other is a newer program, also offered by Google, called Google Wonder Wheel. Using both, will in fact, help you quite a bit.

In my next article I will show you how to use both of these programs to find keywords to use towards targeting qualified traffic to your site. If you haven’t already done so, I suggest subscribing to my RSS feed so that you won’t miss my next article. Also, I suggest subscribing to the main RSS Feed so that you don’t miss articles written by my fellow writers here on SEOHosting.com.

In the business of search engine marketing, choosing the correct keywords to target is crucial towards the overall success in your online business. The folks who use Pay Per Click services, such as the Google AdWords program, their overall success depends on bidding on the right keywords. For search engine marketers who target organic keywords, the same process is involved; however, instead of bidding for keywords are you rolling the dice on whether you can rank for the keywords you target. Both aspects of search engine marketing have their pro’s and con’s and both equally have their share of stresses.

In my business of search engine marketing, I don’t fool around too much with Pay Per Click. I focus on organic search. The two primary reasons why I focus on organic search versus pay per click is because I am very good at it and secondly I have something to show for my work after it is done. With Pay Per Click, once your campaign money expires so does your listings in the search engines. With organic search, I have an endless amount of free traffic for as long as my keywords continue to be ranked in the search engine.

With all that said, I want to show you an example of how I choose keywords to target in the organic search section of search engines, mainly Google.

I have used quite a few tools in the past to help me do keyword research. Over time, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool has grown on me. It is my favorite tool to use and it is free. In the examples in this article, I will be using this tool. If you have never used the Google AdWords keyword tool for researching keywords, you should give it a try. I think you’ll enjoy it. Let’s roll through a few examples of how I find keywords to target.

Nike

Nike is a very popular brand of shoes. It is very unlikely that I would be successful ranking well in Google for the search term: Nike. Granted, it could be done, but it would take a ton of work in order to pull it off. Needless to say, the amount of time and energy I would have to invest towards ranking for the term Nike I could instead use that towards ranking for about 20 other keyword phrases instead.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool Results For Nike:

[Click to view full size]

Looking at the above screen shot you will see that Nike generates over 13 million searches in Google each month. Ranking #1 on the Nike page in Google would be a total dream. Like I said, anything is possible, but with the amount of time and energy needed to do so, it might not be worth it. Instead, I use my time and energy to rank for longtail keywords.

Longtail keywords are keyword phrases that have a much lower level of competition while also having a decent amount of monthly searches. Longtail keywords are also keyword phrases that are much easier to rank well in Google.

Longtail Keywords For Nike

Here are some examples of longtail Nike keywords that I would target.

• Nike Shoe Sales
• Nike Shoes on Sale
• Nike Shoe Deals
• Nike Shoe Clearance
• Kids Nike Shoes
• Mens Nike Shoes
• Nike Baseball Cleats
• Nike Football Cleats

I would write blog posts using these keyword phrases as post titles. From there, I would make sure that the first paragraph of the post included the title phrase, and then I would make sure the entire article include proper alt text and images all with the post title name. Once the content is indexed, it is very likely that the page will rank well. If it doesn’t then you will have to do a little link building, no big deal. The point is that the amount of time and energy invested into ranking for longtail keywords are much less than trying to go for primary keywords. Also, most all attempts to aim for mainstream keywords end in failure.

One of the main reasons why I target longtail keywords over mainstream keywords is because I feel it is better to rank on the top ten for a keyword phrase that has only 1000 searches per month compared to ranking on the second page (results 11 through 20) for a keyword phrase that receives 10,000. Not very many people investigate the links on page two.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this article. What are some other ways you research longtail keywords? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

I often get asked this question and I would like to open up a discussion with you regarding domain name selection in relation to search engine ranking. In my experience, I feel that the domain name you choose can strongly influence the keywords you rank for in Google. I know that this isn’t always the case, because there are plenty of popular blogs that have odd names, that rank for keywords that aren’t found in their domain name. 

The difference I see though is with popularity and backlinks pointing back to these more popular sites. For me, I build very low traffic and low key niche sites. Just about every web site that I build has a domain name with the primary keywords in it that I am targeting. Typically it doesn’t take very long to rank for the keyword phrase I am targeting. Within that, I will also rank for many relevant keyword phrases based off the primary keyword phrase due to me writing content that specifically targets these other phrases. 

All in all, I have had and continue to have great success with doing this. With that said, I’ll admit, I have never tried to target keyword phrases using a domain name that didn’t match up with the primary keyword phrase I target. So I can’t say for sure that what I am doing is truly a legitimate tactic or strategy. That is why I wanted to carry on a discussion with you about it. I’d like to know your opinion on how important do you think domain name selection is for search engine ranking? Share your feedback and opinions using the comment form below.