How do I choose which keywords to use for my links?

Without doubt, this is one of the most important questions when you look to gain more traffic for your website. Essentially, there are 2 crucial factors that determine whether a keyword is a diamond or a dog:

1. Search volume – being on page one in the search engines for a keyword that nobody is searching for it pointless. Rather than guessing what your customers might be searching for, you need to establish exactly what they’re searching for and how often.

2. Search competition – Trying to get to page one for ultra-competitive keywords such as ‘loans’ or ‘car insurance’ would be a long, difficult and ultimately expensive exercise. Image you decided you wanted to take-up jogging; you wouldn’t go out on the first day and try to complete a marathon and with linking, you need to start with realistic keywords that may not bring in huge volumes of traffic but are at least achievable.

So how do you find these keywords? With free tools you can do some research to identify which keywords are going to be idea for your linking campaign. For this example, we’ll use the example of a company that sells ladies footwear and want to start selling on-line.

1. Firstly, we’ll go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter our ‘seed’ keyword which in this case will be ‘ladies shoes’. We ensure we’re searching for ‘phrase match’ and then click ‘search’. Google will then generate a list of keywords with the amount of times the phrase is searched for each month.

From this data we can see the following data for the term ‘ladies shoes’:

We can see from this data that there are 74,000 monthly searches for ‘ladies shoes’ – Local searches is the data for your specific country so assuming you only want to target visitors in your country then this is the figure you should use.

We then go to the Google home page so we can do a search for our keyword, ‘ladies shoes’. However, we add some conditioning to our search so Google weeds out some of the less relevant results. This conditioning is called a boolean search and is extremely useful in establishing our realistic competition. In this instance, what you’ll type into Google’s search box is:

allintitle:”ladies shoes”

This will tell us how many pages actually contain the search phrase in the title, rather than just somewhere in the page so the data is more relevant to our needs. Once we’ve done our search, this is what we get:

You can see that there are 1,130,000 competing pages for our keyword. We now know how many searches there are and how many pages we’re competing with. To give us a figure that we can actually use for comparison purposes, we need to divide the amount of competing pages by the amount of monthly searches so in this example, the equation will look like this:

1,130,000 (competing pages) divided by 74,000 (monthly searches) = 15.27 (the difficulty rank or DR)

On it’s own that number is meaningless but if we look at another example, we can make comparison. From our list of keywords Google gave us from the original search we can see that the term ‘ivory shoes’ has a search volume of  4,100 monthly searches. Obviously that is significantly less than the seed keyword but before we dismiss it as being too low, lets look at the competition:

Using our formula, we’ll calculate the DR as follows:

47,100 (competing pages) divided by 4,100 (monthly searches) = 11.46 (the difficulty rank or DR)

We can now see from the two examples that can one is more difficult to rank for then the other:

Ladies shoes DR = 15.27

Ivory shoes DR = 11.46

As ‘ivory shoes’ has the much lower DR, it would be a better choice than trying to rank for ‘ladies shoes’. It should also be remembered that whilst there are a lot fewer searches for ‘ivory shoes’, it will be a lot easier to get onto the first page of the search engines. Furthermore, this is just one keyword that could be applied to one page of your site so image if there are 20, 30 or even 100 similar keywords that you could optimise for and that amounts to a huge volume of traffic.

Does this sound a bit complicated and time-consuming? Luckily there is some free software that can analyse both the search volume and competition of hundreds of keywords in just a few moments so we’d strongly recommend you download a free copy from this link rather than the slightly tedious method we’ve outlined above.