Hi, welcome to Sunday Morning SEO. This is a new guide about search engine optimisation, or SEO for short. If you want to improve your rankings and increase your search engine traffic, tune in on Sunday mornings. My name is Dee Barizo and I’ve had experience as a full-time search marketer. This morning we’ll look at keyword research.
Keyword research is one of the fundamental activities in SEO. Many bloggers consider this activity to be tedious, but here are two quick and easy ways to find traffic generating keywords for your posts.
To illustrate these methods, let’s pretend you’re a sports blogger. With the NBA All-Star Game coming up in one week, you plan on publishing a couple posts about it this week. You expect a lot of basketball fans to be searching Google for information about the game. Therefore, you want to figure out the keywords that they might use and insert those keywords in your content.
You can go to Google and type in nba all star game. Here’s a screenshot.
You can actually click the keywords below nba all star game and go directly to the search engine results pages for those keywords. For example, clicking on nba all star game 2009 takes you straight to this results page.
As you can imagine, currently nba all star game is a very popular keyword. While searching for that keyword, many people will notice the other keywords and click them. This makes those other keywords great search terms to include in your content.
The second method involves searching for a popular keyword. Then, you can go to the bottom of the search results page and find related search terms.
So, sticking with our example, here is a screenshot of the bottom of the search results page for nba all star game 2009. You can click the screenshot for a bigger image.
Again, each of related keywords are links that point to the relevant search engine results page. Many people will see these keywords so it’s a good idea to target them with your posts.
Your Turn
Try these methods and let us know the keywords you discover.