Keyword Research - Article Marketing With Free Keyword Research

Imagine you are selling a product for dog training. This is a great niche to work in, but the competition is fierce if you do not pick the right keywords. For instance, if you wanted to use the keywords "how to train a dog", you would find over 60,000 people per month are searching for this exact phrase. Now, while that may sound good to you, it is important to see what you competition for that keyword is. When I look up the competition for that keyword, I find that there are 1,750,000 results for that keyword. That is way more people than I care to compete with and it make take a long time to work up the ranks to get to the front page of Google.
What is a long-tail keyword?
A long-tail keyword is a keyword that has been expanded from an original keyword phrase. Here is an example:
Dog
Dog Training
How to Train a Dog
How to Train a Dog to Stop Barking
How to Train a Dog to Stop Barking at Strangers
Keyword Competition
As your goal in article marketing is to get to the top of Google and other search engines, having the least amount of competition is extremely important. To find out what your competition is, type in your long-tail keyword into Google in quotes. "how to train a dog to stop barking at strangers". On the top right of the page it will give you the search results for that term. The purpose of putting quotes around your keywords is that it tells Google to only show results with that exact phrase in it, word for word. That is your real competition. The standard number that you want to be under is 5,000. If you can find keywords that are under 5,000 you will probably be able to rank highly on Google.
Keyword Monthly Search Results
You also want to check out how many people are actually typing in the keywords you want to rank for. Of course, the bigger the number, the more potential traffic you will have. You can find the free Google tool to find out this information if you type into your browser adwords.google.com/select/keywordtoolexternal
When you get into the keyword tool, just type in your keyword phrase and click on "get keyword ideas". This will not only give you a monthly average visitor count, but it will give you many other keyword ideas. The minimum number here varies from expert to expert, but usually most people are looking for 100 monthly visitors or over.
Natural Listings and Page Rank
The last thing you want to check out is the natural listings under Google. When you type in your keywords without quotes, you want to look and see who your competition is. Every listing on Google has a page rank that goes from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest. You can check each of the top sites to see what their page rank by going to prchecker.com. If the place where you are submitting your articles has a higher page rank than those listed on page one, you have a very good chance of being listed on the first page.
To summarize, if you do not have good keywords, people will not find your articles or landing page and you will not make sales. Keyword research is paramount, but does not have to take a long time. Do not spend days on this, an hour or two is sufficient to find the words you are looking for.

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