After you’ve picked your niche, you need to do some keyword research in order to get the word out about your site. Many beginning entrepreneurs make the mistake of choosing their niche and then launching a website shortly after that with no thought to keyword research.
But entrepreneurs that grasp the benefits of well-chosen keywords take the time to research because they understand the relationship between traffic and keywords. Proper keyword research will allow you to know which words get your target audience’s attention because those are the words they use themselves in a search engine.
Keyword research will position your website or blog at the top of search engine results so that your site receives plenty of traffic. When you’re targeting keywords, even subtle things like the plural form of a word make a difference.
For instance if your niche is pet training then it’s important to know that the word ‘dog’ receives forty five million searches a month while the word ‘dogs’ receives only sixteen million.
Your goal is to select keywords that will garner you the most searches per words. What you’re looking for is something with little competition but a lot of searches. You can shell out money to pay for fancy keyword tools like Market Samurai to help you in your quest, but there are free alternative tools like Google Adwords Keyword Tool where you still get the information you need to get the traffic you want.
Using the wrong keywords means you’re missing out on important traffic and missing out on the sales you could be making. You can use the wrong keywords and bring people to your site, but it’ll be those people who are not interested in what you’re selling. You want your keywords to be relevant to your audience.
When you build your site, you also want to make sure that you not only use keywords in your paragraphs, but you also want to make sure that you use keywords in your titles. When you pick a name for your website, select one with a keyword or keywords in the URL.
Remember the better you use SEO (search engine optimization) on your site, the higher it will rank when search engines display the results. One of the mistakes entrepreneurs make is naming their pages incorrectly in general.
Be specific. Don’t have an ‘About’ page. Going back to the earlier example about pet training, have an ‘About Pet Training’ page. When you put up a contact page or box, use a keyword phrase there as well. Such as, “Contact me for more information on pet training.” This nets you additional keywords.