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Research Your Keywords and Your Competition

Written by: Jeff Pela

Article Overview: When companies open for business, it is a good idea that the business owners studies their competition and has a good understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. This holds true for e-businesses you never want to start a new project and spend money without knowing who you are going into business against. Sales and marketing managers have always needed information about their competitors’ products, prices, channels of distribution, and promotional strategies to plan their own marketing strategies. Search engine optimization is a type of marketing strategy, and in order to formulate an affective campaign of your own, you must be well informed about the optimization strategies of your competitors.

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Research Your Keywords and Your Competition

The fastest and easiest way to gain information on your competition is to enter the keywords in which you intend to market into search engines and look for the results. First you want to search for a term, i.e. car wash (All examples are with Google). You should see a blue box indicating the number of total results found for that keyword. Next do the same search with quotation marks around the words; this is a more accurate search, because the quotation marks indicate that you are looking for that exact phrase. This technique give you an approximate idea about how many sites there are using this term within their website title or text. Although this is a good method to determine the total number of sites that are indexed on the web within your keyword, you are not competing against each of these sites, but more specifically the sites that are properly optimized.

The optimizer would want to look at the amount of pay per click (PPC) ads on the page, which gives an idea as to how much people are willing to spend on advertising for that keyword (the more PPC ads, the more people are willing to spend on advertising).

There are also many free tools which you can view the total number of searches per keyword, and also get suggestions of other keywords related to your specific search such as:
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/keyword-suggestion-tool.html?
and https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

Take all of this information into consideration when performing your research. Look for keywords that get a good number of monthly searches, but doesn't have in the hundred of millions in competition. Pay attention to the keywords and try and be as descriptive as possible, which usually helps with choosing a keyword/keyword phrase that will be better choice for your example. For example choose "shoe repair" instead of "shoes".

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  Choosing The Right Keywords For Your Business

Home > SEO > Jeff Pela > Research Your Keywords and Your Competition
Article Tags: accurate search, Google, keyword suggestion tool, PPC, quotation marks, search engines

About the Author: Jeff Pela
RSS for Jeff's articles - Visit Jeff's website

Jeff Pela is a Search Engine Optimization expert based out of Union, New Jersey. He has over 8 years web design and SEO experience. He introduced Highline Technologies in 2003 to help businesses improve profits by establishing a web presence where needed, or enhance a company's current web presence.

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Re: Web Business Podcast is LIVE! :) Re: Web Business Podcast is LIVE! :) - Hi David - have you thought of making these into videos? Even if it doesn't have you live on screen? Remembering the Success Secret Keywords would be a lot easier if we could see them.
Re: Congratultations to GT! Re: Congratultations to GT! - Hi GT, Competition is great and i know I wouldn't be here without it, but it is not the main reason for posting and participating. But I admit, it is the trigger I need to get some work done. If there is none, i create one for myself and try to make it. First prize is ice cream.
Re: SEO... Re: SEO... - 1: Find the Best Keywords 2: Discover Your Competitors 3: Optimize Your Title 4: Optimize Your META Tags 5: Use Headings 6: Use Title and ALT Attributes 7: Nomenclatures 8: Create a Site Map Page 9: Include a robots.txt File 10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google MySQL/Oracle:
Scoping Your Articles for Ghostwriters Scoping Your Articles for Ghostwriters - Martin, can you advise your process for scoping out the work for article writing. specifically, 1. How do you scope the boundaries of the article? (is it by the Keywords?) 2. How many keywords do you provide to the ghostwriter for an article of a certain size? 3. How do you measure quality? (is it just your impression that the article is good)? 4. Who owns the article? 5. How do you know that this article is not published elsewhere on the Internet? Thanks
NEW PRODUCTS LIKE = Projector phone in the market NEW PRODUCTS LIKE = Projector phone in the market - Hi ideasuniversity, I'm back. This just shows that there is no end to new stuff coming out. Someone has to work on it. Research and Development never stops. Has anyone a new idea? Let us know what it is. Maybe it can be shown here first in the future.


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