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Beginners WordPress – Your Content Strategy Begins with Keyword Research

By Jan Ashby

Beginning Keyword Research: Building Blocks

Your brain is your best asset for keyword research. When you are starting out, you need to put some thought into content strategy. <– Here is a good article for this

These are the 3 basic steps –

1. Choose possible keywords to start your research

2. Analyze the keyword phrase, and ascertain both the level of competition and popularity of your keywords

3. Find other related keywords

Let’s break it down. Regarding #1 above, you’ll want to discover the language (and location) of your target market. Visit the forums where your targeted group of people hang out; spend some time there, and uncover the language and terms they use. Take notes.

This is the early stage of your keyword research – it’s important to get a feel for whether your target audience is male or female, their average age, how much education they have, and the language they use e.g. *Tip: You can check them out on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ and record what is the biggest challenge your audience faces? (Specifically, examine threads within the forum and examine what’s being most griped about 🙁 ).

In the end, come up with 3 to 5 keywords you wish to rank for on Google

Go here to learn about the new Keyword Planner tool

Keyword Analysis: Trends and Competition

Alright, onto #2 “Keyword Analysis” a.k.a. “Analyzing The Competition”. First of all, when choosing a topic for your wordpress blog, you want to pick a topic that is “trending” and has a lot of monthly searches. You want to examine the level of competition, too. We’ll get to that in a moment.

When I say trending I mean HOT. You can check this in the Google Adwords keyword tool (it’s on the Right, under Columns). Specifically, do NOT select keyword phrases which are downtrending. You want “uptrending” or a stable trend.

As to competition analysis – I’d select keyword phrases with 100k or less competing websites.

Coming Up with Related Keywords to Use

At the Google adwords keyword tool, you can get RELATED keywords by typing in your base keyword and hitting the button. Be sure to SELECT the “Keyword Ideas” or you will not receive any related terms.

To perform deep keyword research, you’ll need to examine all the pages; place a checkmark by each of your choices. Then export to a spreadsheet. Now you’ll need to get into the process of elimination. You want to go through each keyword, and FIND the best ones – i.e., phrases with high monthly searches and lowest competition (remember, fewer than 100,000 competing sites).

Alternative Method: Another way to come up with related keywords (a.k.a LSI keywords) is to do a search in Google & locate Wikipedia articles. These are loaded with “related keywords”. Go to wikipedia and enter your main keyword; HIT the arrow. Most of the time it’ll either have an article about your “seed” keyword, or else it’ll redirect you.

Scour the webpage and note down all occurrences of Related keywords (note: many will be underlined).

Synonym Tool

Types of Keyword Phrases: An Explanation

You have seed keywords, mid-keywords, and longtail keywords. Seed keywords are what you start with (these are generated by your brain oftentimes), and consist of 1 to 2 words. Mid-keywords are an important link between your SEED keyword and the more specific, longtail keywords. True longtails are 4 words and more.

Use of Synonyms and Other Resources to Generate Longtail Keywords

There is thesaurus.com. But say you want to locate a bunch of places where you can find synonyms – simply ENTER the keyword, a space, and the tilde (~ ). It would be thus: dog training ~terminology .

Further:
If you want to use Google Instant to create more ideas, just put a SPACE before and after the keyword phrase. Also, you can use LETTERS A thru Z before or after the keyword phrase.

Additional Note: As a wildcard, you can insert an asterisk * in the keyword phrase (at Google). Example: if your phrase is “how to train a dog” you’d put an asterisk inside the phrase like this – how to train a * dog. By doing so, you’d receive a listing of many different sorts of dogs (how to train a german shepherd dog, how to train a poodle dog, how to train a terrier dog ).

Some people may find it a bit daunting to begin the keyword journey – but learning CAN be fun, and with the excellent training that the Sakura Project 😮 offers you shouldn’t have a problem.

I look forward to helping you on your WordPress journey. As a beginner to wordpress, you need not be intimidated – just know that

Jan Ashby and John Jarvis are here to help you .

Good Luck to You –

Jan Ashby