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.

Google and other search engines factor in that many sites online today are produced and published by people who don’t have all that much experience with the Internet, optimizing for search engines, HTML and things of that nature. Over the years, technology has made it possible for anyone with any skill level to create a web page, web site or even a blog. Quite honestly, things are much easier today for people who want to have a web site compared to say 5 to 10 years ago.

While there are quite a few people who are indeed SEO gurus, it seems also that there are sites created by very entry level Internet publishers. With the entry level publishers I have actually seen many times that their pages and posts rank very well in the search engines but also go completely against the grain of what most all experienced SEOs would advice or even put into their own practice.

Some times a great SEO strategy is to just do nothing. This might sound silly, but really, search engines have no choice but to compensate for mistakes in HTML and other forms of coding. Furthermore, search engines have to compensate for spelling and other forms of grammar errors. What I mean to say by doing nothing, is really more less in your site building. While I’ll admit, it indeed is important to have a search engine friendly web site or blog, I often question how effective it is for an individual publisher to invest tons of time and money into making sure that every single element in SEO strategy is performed.

If search engines such as Google were to hold to true to the common SEO techniques that many of the more experienced professionals use, then the result be that these search engines would have a very low volume of listings in their index. Search engines have to assume that there is a large percentage of publishers who are not expert coders and programmers. Otherwise, their index of data would be very very low.

What does that mean for you? Granted, if you are reading this, it is very likely that you are pretty keen on search engines or at a minimum have at least a basic understanding of search engines, how they work and possibly how to get listed in them. SEO professionals really tend to complicate things. This always puzzles me as I can see time and time again situations where non-SEO’ed sites get ranked very well in the search engines.

Amazingly, the sites that I see that do very well are sites that are authored or owned by people who don’t even know what the term search engine optimization means. These level of publishers just focus on what is important to them and their visit visitors and that is the content.

If you are conscious of your SEO and how well your web site and individual pages rank in the search engines, I would suggest that you focus more on your writing. The content within a page has the highest potential to be SEO’ed rather than the actual coding of the page. Google is very forgiven on design and coding efforts. Google is in it for the content and their bots do a pretty decent job at finding content. If it was any other way, then Google and other search engines would have a very difficult time archiving informaiton for their database.

So really, in my opinion, one of the best SEO strategies starts with the content you write. From there you can or should worry about proper coding, HTML, tagging and things like that. The foundation of everything you do online starts with the content. If you don’t have good content on your pages to work from, then you have really no hope with a successful organic search engine ranking campaign.