3 Tips for Keyword Research

One of the most important skills successful bloggers can have is writing original content that is optimized for search engines. Search engines are important source of targeted and free traffic. Blog posts that are optimized for search engines are not easy to write and most important skill for writing content that is optimized for search engines is keyword research. Keywords are essential in optimizing your blog for search engines because they tell what people are searching for online. Keyword research helps bloggers find words and word phrases from their blog topic that people are using when they are searching the internet. Bloggers can then use those words and word phrases in the blog posts they write to optimize them for search engines. If they use them and their synonyms the blog posts their blog content will rank high. And as a result when people are typing those words and phrases in search engines, their blog is listed in the search results, then visitors click on link and come to their blog. Imagine if  a blog is ranked in first place for certain word or phrase that has hundreds of thousands of searches a month. That will bring potential thousands and thousands visitors every month, and more traffic means more popular your blog will be and more money you will be able to make when you monetize your blog with ads and/or affiliate links.

The right keywords are critical for your blog to rank high and gain exposure to connect with the right audience who will be  interested in your content. If you are able to connect with your target audience than you will build your audience and increase the popularity of your blog. Finding best keywords to use in writing blog posts is not easy because of the strong competition. There are many blogs and websites online that are trying to rank high on search engines. The challenge in finding keywords is to find keywords that have large number of searches and low competition. These are keywords for which your blog can outrank the competition. Here are certain tips to help you in the keyword research for your blog:

1. Use keyword tools to create a list of keywords and phrases. The first step in researching a  keywords for your blog is to create a list of relevant keywords that you can use in your blog posts. Using keyword research tools can be  of great help for bloggers. There are many keyword research tools bloggers can use to create a list of keywords they can use. The good thing about keyword research tools is that some of the best of these tools are free to use and others have free trial. Bloggers can use one or more of them and cross reference the keywords lists for better results. Bloggers can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, Promedia Suggesster, Wordtracker, Soovle and others  to create a list of keywords they can further categorize and refine. This list will be your starting list of finding best keywords you can use to try out rank your competition.
2. Use long keyphrases.  Some of the keywords with high search volume has stong competition which can be hard to outrank. Because of this a good strategy would be to use long keyphrases  to use in writing your blog content. These keywords are usually phrases of more words, even an entire question phrases. Because of this they have low or no competition and it’s possible to reach high ranking in relatively short amount of time. Low competition exists because of the low search volume which can be a few hundreds or a thousand searches per month. Even if those numbers seem low by combining the traffic form larger number of these low competition keyword phrases you can drive a lot traffic to your blog.  If your blog has many articles written around long keywords with low search volume, the combined number of visitors  that they will bring to your blog can be very high.  Because of this a good strategy would be to go after low search and low competition keywords and phrases where your chances of ranking high in the search engines are greater and the competition will not be older  established blogs
3. Analyze which keywords are used by your competition. Finding the best keywords and phrases to use in writing your blog content is not an easy task. One of the best place to find the best keywords is by checking which keywords does your competition uses to create your starting list of keywords and phrases to use. To see which keywords your competitors are using just find a  blog that is of similar niche as yours, navigate to their website, right click and view the source code. Look for keywords under meta description keywords. Do this for several highest ranking website to build a list of keywords you can use on your blog. Using the keywords that your competition is using can give you some ideas about which keywords you should use and which one you should not. If the competition is using certain keywords and their website  has high PR and is considered an authority, then maybe you should think about keywords that are variations of the keywords they use or keyphrases that they are not ranked for and and there is not much competition. This is especially true if your blog is new. You should disregard the keywords with highest volume. If you go for most obvious keywords with high search volume, because of the strong completion you might end up seeing little of no traffic from the search engines.