Keywords with stable monthly search demand and low link building competition. If you can find these ‘golden keyword’ then you will be building a solid foundation for your internet marketing business.

1. Ascertain Demand For The Keyword

It is vital that you ascertain whether or not there is a demand for your keyword. No demand= No money. Use the following tips to help decide whether it is a keyword that you will want to rank for.

a. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Wordtracker Free Keyword Research Tool. Have a look is there any/a good monthly search volume? Note for the Google Keyword Research Tool perform searches using ‘broad’ ‘exact’. Make a note of the different results. Does it still look promising?

b. Look for presence of Pay Per Click (PPC) ads? Are their advertisers bidding on your keyword? How many pages deep do the PPC ads go? The more pages deep, the more competition. If there is competition it suggest that there is money to be made (otherwise why would people be bidding on it). Conversely if there is no one bidding on the ads it might be because there is no money in it.

c. Make use of Spyfu. Spyfu offers a free research tool that shows how many clicks per day and add recives.

d. Use Google traffic estimator tool. The allows you to set a budget for the day and it will estimate how much traffic you will receive.

e. Enter the keyword into Google and record the top 10 results. Make a note of the Alexa ranking of each of the websites. As a general rule any site with an alexa ranking of under 300,000 gets a decent amount of traffic.

2. Check Link Building Competition For Keyword

Once you have established that there is a demand for your keyword, you now want to check the link building competition. You may have found a keyword that has nice demand but if the link building competition is too strong, then it might take you too long to get ranked. Use the following points to check your link building competition.

A. Perform a simple search into Google – Make a note of the results, are there 100’s of millions of pages returned or just 100’s of thousands? More results may mean more competition.

B. Perform the inanchor search command. To do this simply type this command into Google, inanchor:”keyword” (obviously replacing keyword with the keyword that you are trying to target). The inanchor command will tell you how many websites have the keyword in it’s anchor text. This is an excellent measure of competition.

C. Perform the intitle search command. Simple type into Google, intitle:”keyword” (again replacing keyword with you the keyword you have chosen). The intitle search command will tell you how many websites have the keyword in the title tag. If they have it in the title tag when can assume that they are also trying to optimise for this keyword.

D. Perform both the inanchor and intitle search command. Type the following into Google, intitle:”keyword” inanchor:”keyword”. This will help determine how many website have the keyword in the title tag and how many have it in anchor text. This will really help determine our competition. Make a note of the results anything under 1,000 means low level of backlink building, 100,000 medium level, 1,000,000 you have a lot of work to do!

3. Analyse the top 10 results for your keyword.

You many have found a keyword that gets good search volume and had low link building competition however if the top 10 websites are well optimised and have lots of backlinks pointing to them, then you might have some problems moving them.

A. Check the backlinks at Yahoo site explorer. This will help get an approximate figure of have strong the site is.

B. Look at the domain age. The older the more trusted by Google.

C. Check the Page Rank of the sites.

D. Look at the domain extensions. Are they .org, .gov,.edu

E. Look for prevalence of web 2.0 properties. Web 2.0 properties may be easier to displace.

F. Evaluate the Onpage SEO of the sites. Go to sites homepage and view source. See if the Onpage optimisation is good. If not then that is positive.

G. Make use of Firefox plugin “SEO Quake” that will tell you this information very quickly.

This should help you evaluate your the strength of your competitors in the top 10 search results.

By the end of the checklist you should have found keywords that have a stable monthly search demand, with low link building competition and the ability to knock the competitors off the top 10 spot.

To your massive success.

Guy

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