Chapter 11. Choose Your Target KeywordsGet out your crystal ball! That's one way to guess the words that searchers use. If your crystal ball is as cloudy as ours, however, you might want to use a few other methods, too. That's what you will learn in this chapter. In the preceding chapter, you learned how to get your site indexed for organic search, but getting indexed is not enough. You need to get your pages to be highly ranked in the organic search results to generate traffic to your site. Or you need to invest in paid search techniques for your site's pages to show up on that search results page. No matter whether you are focusing on organic or paid search or both, you need to know which keywords searchers are using. If you do not know which words searchers are entering, you cannot purchase the right keywords (for paid placement), nor can you make sure those words are prominently featured on your pages (for organic search). Each time you embark on a new search marketing campaign, you will choose your target list of keywords. In this chapter, we show you that choosing the right keywords for your search marketing campaign does not have to be guesswork. We explain the basics of keyword planningthe method by which you choose your keywords. This chapter covers the following topics:
At the end of this chapter, you will be able to choose the best keyword targets for every search marketing campaign you undertake. Let's start by getting an appreciation for why keyword planning is so important. |