Choosing the right keyword

by Scott Alexander, 7/26/2006

One thing to remember when choosing your keyword for search engine optimization, is that the internet users know what they are looking for. Using an example of real estate, people know where they want to buy a house, not just the fact that they want to buy a house. Learning this can greatly increase your success.

Take the word "Michigan Real Estate" - If we search in Google we find 111,000,000 competing sites. All of these pages are fighting for 25,550 search queries according to Overture. That is a lot of competition. And depending on what you do, this keyword is so broad that it may not even be a relevant searcher that finds you. This is a big state and the change that you sell real estate in the area the web search is looking is very small.

Now lets look as some more specific searches:

12893, lansing mi real estate
8509, detroit mi real estate
7555, traverse city mi real estate
6101, clinton township mi real estate
4928, east lansing mi real estate
4328, alpena mi real estate
4259, houghton lake mi real estate
4026, jackson mi real estate
3502, gaylord mi real estate
3497, real estate and troy mi
3286, okemos mi real estate
3023, marquette mi real estate
3013, canton mi real estate
2941, coldwater mi real estate
2667, cadillac mi real estate
2618, sterling heights mi real estate
2434, southfield mi real estate
2327, ann arbor mi real estate
2268, mount pleasant mi real estate
2038, warren mi real estate
1978, real estate commerce mi
1977, dearborn mi real estate
1966, novi mi real estate
1877, macomb mi real estate
1808, commerce township real estate mi

These 25 searches for real estate by town in Michigan total 95,819 searches in a month according to Overture. And when looking at one of these searches "Alpena MI real estate" you see in Google that there are only 312,000 - Now if you were near Alpena, MI this would be very easy competition and almost all of the users to find you would be interested in what you want.

Now this can be applied to anything, not just real estate. It is part of good web site optimization.

Remember that only 25,000 people search for Michigan Real Estate but when looking at just 25 towns, there are over 95,000 searches all with much less competition.

If you want to succeed in Web Site Optimization, get specific.

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About the author

Scott Alexander is the lead programmer for CoreLevel Inc., a company the specializes in real estate web site designs

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