One of the most important things you can do to make sure your articles are more effective is keyword research. Since people use keywords to search for information in the search engines like Google, you’ll want to target appropriate keywords if you wish to show up at the top of the results pages.

You can find relevant keywords in many different ways, but the easiest way is to use Google’s research tool.

You can find it at: http://adwords.google.com/select/keywordtoolexternal

Simply type in a keyword for your website and Google will give you many keyword ideas.

Example: If you’ve got a website about pet recipes, you would enter terms like “cooking pet food”, “homemade pet food”, “natural pet food’, “cook dog food”, etc.

Google also gives you the numbers that tell you how often people search for each term. That way you know the keywords you’re targeting are worth your efforts.

Another important piece of the puzzle is figuring out how much competition there is for each keyword. If you are targeting words that have too much competition it’s going to be harder for you to reach the top of the search engine results pages. Don’t worry about that happening, because it’s easy to figure out how much competition there is.

Simply go to Google and type in your keyword surrounded by quote marks. The results that pop up are the other sites that are specifically targeting that term.

Example: When I search for “Pet recipes” I see there are 66,600 webpages that are already listed for that term.

Google Search for "Pet Recipes"

Now that you have these keywords you can use them to give you a basis for your articles. It’s easiest to choose one keyword per article and focus the topic around that keyword. Remember to put the same term in your title as well.

***Bonus tip for keyword research:

Her’s how you can expand your keyword research using the Search Results you get from Google.

When typing the keyword into the search box, add the tilde symbol before the term, for example: ~pet recipes

This will tell Google to search for and display results that Google Searchers have used in place of or that are similar to the term “pet recipes”, it will highlight these terms in the results making them easy to spot.

You can further refine this by showing only the results with terms that are similar and not the results that contain the term “pet” by adding the following to the search:

~pet recipes -pet

So now you’re saying, search for results containing terms similar to “pet recipes” but don’t show the results containing the term “pet”.

Article Marketing Tip #2 will be coming tomorrow so be sure to bookmark and come back!

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