Keywords

The way results are shown on the search engines is by the ranking of the site (according to age, quality of content, links, etc) and the relevance of the site to answer the search query. Hence, if a person searches for “golf” she will get 1.8 billion results. Good luck competing with that if you are new on the golf market!

On the other hand, if your site is aiming at long tail keywords (usually more than two words) or what other internet marketers call “low hanging fruits”, you will have less competition. Hence, if you type the search words: “left handed golf swing” in Google, you get 7,25 million results.

If you search for “left handed golf swing Florida” you get 3 million results. You get the idea.

 The beauty of targeting longer keywords sequence is that you are getting a tighter target market composed of people really interested in using golf for left handed in Florida.

To begin, you can download a free WordPress S.E.O. plugin called Yoast S.E.O.

You can download the plug by login-in your WP dashboard and clicking on plugins “add New”. Then you download and then activate it.

Yoast S.E.O. Has a cool traffic light rating system for your posts, reminding you to create the snippet and keywords description of your pages or posts.

First, what would you answer to the question: “in no more than 5 words, what is your site about?”

You want to use keywords in your site title. 

Once you have it, you can go back in your dashboard, Settings, general and site title. You might have already set it when you activated WordPress. Take a moment to consider if it stills represents to its best your website.

Right under it, you can see the tagline. This should be a brief description of your website. Some people put again what they put in the title. Other people are saying you should put different keywords so it is not considered keywords stuffing. 

As you can see it is hard not to talk about Keywords without talking about S.E.O.

Before writing a page or a blog post, ask yourself “What would I type in the search bar to get to my page?

Often, search queries starting in “how to, Why, the top ten, which is, what is the best, etc” will come to mind.

When writing on a niche you know well, the keywords come naturally. There are also tools selling you synonyms but when you write about a subject you know well, you naturally use synonyms to make your text more readable.

For a long time, the number one result for the keywords search “click here” was Adobe. You see, the other websites linking to Adobe used their link that said “click here” to get Adobe!

Some funny digital marketers conducted experiments and were able to rank one guy for the keywords “the coolest guy in the world”, There has been many other “Google Bombing” for less flattering terms aimed at politicians. You can read about the topic here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing

Come right back here though. Suffice to say that these Google manipulations are what is called “black hat” and are not recommended under any circumstances. Your site would get slapped badly.

There are many schools of thoughts on how to do keywords research for your WordPress blog and either write pages or posts. You can do a mix of all of them or find the keywords research method that suits your needs. Best of all it that you can change method if you see your blog posts or pages are not ranking after at least a couple of months.

First of all, you have to be realistic about ranking for short keywords. The short keywords are not even an option anymore unless you build a huge authority website with an unlimited amount of high-quality content in which case you would not be reading this.

Honestly, there are as many opinions on keywords and S.E.O. as there are digital marketers!

1. Neil Patel’s way of doing keywords research for your blog posts and pages.
2. The Income School’s way of doing keyword research for your WordPress blog.
3. Miles Beckler’s way of researching keywords for your WordPress blog.
   
   
   

   Neil Patel’s way
   
   

Let’s start with Neil Patel’s way of doing keyword research. To begin, please notice that Neil is THE S.E.O. guy. His website Neilpatel.com offers a free tool called Ubersuggest which is pretty cool and you can search any website’s domain ranking, the number of backlinks, and keywords ranking. It also has a keyword tool.

If you put his site neilpatel.com in his tool Ubersuggest, you get that he has 3.5 million organic traffic, ranks for 1,7 million keywords! and over 9 million backlinks and a domain score of 91. You can read his way of doing keywords research by “spying” on his competitors here: http:// www.neilpatel.com/blog/competitor-seo/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email

Despite the name, keyword “spying” is completely legal. It is just that the term research would be so much less intriguing.

There are a few caveats about Neil’s approach that you need to be aware of:

1. He has a huge team of writers and S.E.O. and staff. He and his team do way more than just keywords research and posting. He has a very popular YouTube channel, podcast and so many other sources of traffic that if you are just starting your blog cannot duplicate.
2. His keywords approach and backlinking by contacting website owners and asking for links are extremely tedious and if you want to outsource it, it would cost you a lot of money. His techniques are not for beginners as you would devote all your time to finding backlinks and not creating quality content.
3. His explanations are great but sometimes too technical. If you are a beginner some of his explanations will fly over your head.
4. You have to admire the fact that he is ranking #1 for such keywords as “affiliate” and “internet marketing” among others.
5. He is selling his S.E.O. services but at a very high price (I mean cash-in your 401K prices) and his clients are, for the most part, huge companies and not little bloggers.
6. One of Neil’s gem about Keyword is that he insists that you should be writing one solid page per keyword and not multiple smaller pages. He is talking about 2 to 3 thousands words page or blog post. He says that having more than one entry about the same keywords “confuses Google”🙃

If you use the free tool https://moz.com/domain-analysis Neilpatel.com only shows a domain authority of 88 (which is still HUGE!), linking root domain of 70.7 thousand and ranking keywords of 560K.

This also shows you that all those tools will give you contradicting results. 

The Income School Way

The Income School’s is a great membership site and Youtube channel based on the business model of building content-rich and niche targeted blogs and websites to make money online. 

They have a great video that you must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Auj4cBVzvGQ

Basically, they are proponent of using Google’s suggestions when you type your main keyword, copy-paste the suggestions and make a list. Put these results in the search box again and get more suggestions, etc.

Also, scroll down Google’s  first page results and see the item called “People also searched…” These are Google’s gifts to you.

Miles Beckler’s way

Miles is an awesome digital marketer and shares pearls on his Youtube channel. He is kind of in the middle of the road about keyword research meaning he puts in hours to rank websites and has been very successful at it. You can see his process here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_FfdjNOgpQ

So which kind of keyword research are you going to do? You can always change tactic if you do not see results after months.

There are many digital marketers who report that even though the Google Keyword search said there were no searches for certain keywords, they decided to target them anyway and are getting valuable traffic and making sales from those keywords.