Keyword Selection: Tips For Choosing Keywords That Rank Higher In The Search Engines

Keyword selection is by far the most important piece of any internet marketing campaign and doing it the right way can mean the difference between making a lot of money and making nothing.

But, there is one key part of keyword selection that a lot of people get wrong.

I'm talking about evaluating the competition. You see, most courses tell you to simply search for the keyword in quotes and it there are less than 20,000 competing sites then you are good to go.

Of course, this is appealing to many people, I mean it's so simple a monkey could do it so it's no wonder that a lot of people use this as their criteria for evaluating the competition.

And, while it may work in some cases, it usually doesn't which is why most new internet marketers get frustrated with lack of traffic and sales - they are choosing the wrong keywords based on a faulty formula for evaluating the competition.

There's 2 problems that I see with this method.

First of all, no one really searches using quotes so you are getting the wrong list of results in the first place.

And second, this method does not tell you the strength of the competing sites and analyzing the strength is the only way to know what it will take to beat those sites and get into the top 10. If you can't get into the top 10, then there is no sense in targeting the keyword which is why this step is a critical aspect of your overall keyword selection process.

So, how do you analyze the competition?

What you want to do is find out what Google thinks the most relevant sites are for that keyword and in order to do that, you need to search for it without quotes.

Then take each site one by one and look at things like their on page SEO, the age of the domain, the page rank, the back links to the site and the back links to the page. When looking at back links though, it's not enough to just count how many links the site has - you need to look at the strength of those links as well.

Once you have done this analysis, you will have a good idea of the strength of the competition and then you can decide if you can beat these sites or not.

Using this method of evaluation as part of your keyword selection criteria will help you eliminate those keywords that you have no chance of ranking for and save you from wasting a lot of time and effort.

Next, find out more about keyword selection and learn how to do keyword research that really pays off!