How To Do Keyword Research For Article Marketing

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The brand new website owners very soon see that writing and submitting articles for web publishing is the best way for getting more free internet site traffic. While free traffic is always welcome, targeted free traffic is the main goal of most online businesses.

There's a chance you're thinking how will your web site traffic be increased by writing content? Writing content works in two ways: having content published internet creates backlinks to your internet site, thereby improving your site's placement in search engine rankings, and people who read your articles and find them interesting will visit your internet site.

There's a little bit of science you need to use if your content articles will successfully increase traffic to your internet site. The science depends upon the use of keywords, and the term "keyword" includes phrases consisting of several words. You are able to write a brilliant article but, if you choose your keywords unwisely, that article will not achieve all it might in terms of enhanced web site traffic. The truth is that a mediocre, or even downright badly written, article with properly used keywords will work better than a good article with poor use of keywords.

Choosing keywords requires a certain amount of research. You should come up with keywords that a fair number of people use to search for information, but which have not already been used by other writers in previously published content. Discovering keywords people search on is easy, locating keywords with little competitors is easy; getting keywords that have both attributes is a bit harder, but it has to be done.

The point of writing ezine articles is to increase traffic to your internet site, so there is no point in basing your article on keywords nobody (or hardly anybody) ever searches for, but if you choose a keyword that's searched heavily, your competitors will be too great. If you pick a highly popular keyword, high ranking websites will be holding the top spots in the major search engines and your article will be buried so deeply in the search engine results that nobody will ever see it.

Keep it in mind that a "keyword" could actually be made up of several words. In fact, many of the best keywords are phrases of three words or more, and these are known as "long tail keywords". You are able to very easily show how this works by typing a few search phrases into a free research tool (eg Overture, Wordtracker or Google's keyword tool). Try typing in "cats", then "Maine Coon Cats", then "silver Maine Coon cats", then "silver Maine Coon Cats behaviours". You will see that the first search term "dogs" gets thousands of searches but the amount of searches drops dramatically when you start searching under more specific terms.

After getting a list of long tail keywords that are relevant to your internet site, the next step is to research the amount of competition for each keyword. The simplest way to do this is to use Google's advanced search feature and type each of your keywords in turn into the exact phrase box. This is where you will see how many websites are already listed for that keyword or phrase. A useful exercise is to study the sites at the top of the organic searches, so you can assess your competitors.

Market research can be quite time-consuming whenever you first start but, like most things, you will find you speed up with practice. It is tedious work but absolutely essential if you want to make the most of your ezine article writing. If you are able to find a keyword that gets a reasonable amount of searches but has only a few websites listed under that term, you have a chance of getting your article listed high up in the search engines. Getting one of the top positions in the search engine results means your article will be seen by more people and an increase in the level of traffic aimed at your website will be apparent.