Keywords: absolutely, vitally essential to internet marketing, yet the bane of my existence as a marketer.
As a writer, I learned all the wrong skills and it’s taken me a while to figure that out and learn to overcome all that training and experience. I’m going to help you that long, sad, sorry road to ruin.
Writers are taught to create things that are creative and original. And we spend a lot of our time figuring out how to do just that, trying to come up with original ideas to write about, or original slants on old ideas (and they’re pretty much ALL old ideas), original phrases, and especially, original and attention-grabbing titles or headlines. If we can come up with phrases or concepts, analogies, metaphors and similes that NO ONE has thought of ever, so much the better.
Those principles have been drummed into me since I was in grade school (which means for a very, very long time).
Well guess what?
All of that is precisely opposite — and extremely counterproductive to! — what is probably THE major skill for internet marketers: picking keywords.
In internet marketing, you don’t want to be original when you choose your titles and headlines, you want to choose what everyone else has been thinking, literally. Originality in titles and names and headlines can hurt you or at best doesn’t help you.
There are many ways to make money online, and quite a few of them don’t even depend on websites though the bulk of them do, and as you already know, if you’re going to have a website, or write marketing articles, you want to identify the best keywords for the subject matter you’re addressing: What is everyone looking for and what words are they using to search for it? Or, better yet, not what “everyone” is looking for, since the most commonly searched phrase would likely be too competitive to try to rank easily and/or quickly for in Google, but what are a LOT of people looking for?
Watch for my next post about keywords and in the meantime, here are some free tools that I use and enjoy (tho one is a free trial):
WORDTRACKER — Most people know about this, but I thought I’d include it just in case. Also see their free resources on the home page — a free ebook, a video, a paid ebook that looks good, more free tools, articles and more
InstantDomain – Check domain name availability. This is a real favorite of mine. NEVER use Go-Daddy to find out if a domain name you’ve thought of is available or not. Why? Because if you don’t buy your GOOD names that day, they may no longer be available when you do decide to buy. (Ask me how I know.) This is a safe place to look for available domain names.
EXACT DOMAIN TOOL — VERY COOL but alas, now $9.95/mo. though there’s a 30-day free trial. Do watch the DEMO to see how it works.
And speaking of blog posts, here’s a Firefox add-on from the WorkdTracker people which helps you identify best keywords as you’re creating a post. I had tried it once upon a time, but I think it conflicted with something else and I discarded it. I’m downloading it again today and am eager to see how it does. It’s free: SEO Blogger.
An interesting assortment of tools including WhoIs Lookup and others in case
you’re in the mood to buy some already-owned domain names: DOMAIN TOOLS
Where does your website or page stand in Google for for your keyword? Find out here.
More free tools here at SubmitExpress
Part 2: More Essential Keyword Tools
