Think theme, not keyword phrases - page 3

by Andy Williams, 3/27/2007

When people search for stuff at the search engines, they enter a wide range of phrases, even when searching for the same information. Your job is to find all of the variations of search terms used, and pick out those words that often appear in the set of searches. Using these common words in your content will ensure that your page is themed around the topic of your main keyword.

For example, if you were writing a web page about baby shower invitations, you would look for all phrases related to baby showers AND invitations.

Here is how I would do it.

1. Go to Wordtracker and do a compressed search for baby shower invitation (with "number of results" set to 500). Wow, Wordtracker returns 500 results for this phrase. That will give us plenty to work on.

2. Get Wordtracker to calculate the competition for you. Using this method of keyword harvesting, Wordtracker will only find the competition for the first 100 words, but that is OK. These 100 will be the most common search phrases in the group, and those are the ones we are most interested in (since they are the phrases that are most often typed in, and therefore can be used to most strongly theme our page).

3. Email the results to yourself.

4. Import the keywords into your favourite "keyword manipulation" tool. I use Keyword Results Analyzer, but you can use a spreadsheet if you have the relevant spreadsheet skills.

Now, you need to find the words that are most often associated with your main phrase "baby shower invitation(s)" in the queries made at the search engines. This will tell you what words are highly related to your main phrase, and therefore should be used to theme your page.

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