ARTICLE

Common Article Marketing Mistakes: Mistake #1 Not Doing Keyword Research (It’s An Easy Fix!)


Recently I was telling you ,  very first one we listed was the mistake of not doing any keyword research before starting to submit articles.
I know that just hearing the words “keyword research” sounds incredibly boring and cerebral to some, but I assure you that it’s really not as hard as it sounds. Really, anyone can do basic keyword research by just using Google’s free keyword research tool.
For those who are totally new to article marketing, let’s start at the beginning:

What are keywords?

You’ve probably searched for things a million times on Google. When you “google” things, you type a phrase into Google’s search box and then Google presents you with a list of web pages that (hopefully) have the information that you’re looking for.  
From your perspective as the search customer, you’re typing “search terms” into Google’s search box.
But from a website owner’s perspective, those words that you typed into Google’s search box are “keywords”, “keyword terms” or “keyword phrases”–all of those mean the same thing.
Keywords are words on a web page that have special significance about the topic of the web page.

What happens when you do keyword research?

When you do keyword research, you are simply trying to find out what phrases people in your target market are searching for and how many other web pages are competing to meet that demand. If you discover that there are 10,000 searches for a particular keyword phrase, then you have an idea of the traffic potential. If you also discover that there are currently 50,000 web pages competing for those 10,000 searches, you know that for that particular phrase, you’ve got your work cut out for you in the competition department.
Ideally, what you’re looking for are phrases that have a good traffic potential but that also don’t have that many web pages already meeting that demand. In a situation like that, you’ll have an easier time ranking highly for that keyword phrase, because you won’t have that much competition.  It won’t always work out like that though–if you’re in a very competitive field, you’ll just be aware that it may take longer to make headway in the rankings.

What is the big deal about keywords?

The higher your web pages rank in search engines results lists, the more traffic will be directed to your site. Getting a top ranking for keywords that are very important to your niche can make a dramatic difference in the number of visitors to your website and your eventual sales. High rankings can translate into big money.

How are keywords used in article marketing? 

You can strategically use keywords in the title, the article body, the resource boxes, the short description (article summary), and in the keywords field, which will often result in the URL of the page where your article sits containing your keyword phrase.
As you can see, if you know about keywords, it can really chance the way that you do your article submissions.
If “designer dog collars” is one of your keyword phrases, your aim is to get the pages of your website to rank higher in Google when people search for that phrase. Your ultimate goal is to be #1 in the rankings.
When you write articles, one of your keyword phrases will be “designer dog collars”, and by creating article submissions that appropriately use that keyword phrase, you are helping Google to associate the web pages that you link to from your resource box with the keyword term “designer dog collars”.
Ideally, over time the web pages on your site will rise up the rankings, making it so that when someone searches for the phrase “designer dog collars”, your website is one of the top results in Google’s list.
For more specifics on how to actually do keyword research, you may want to check out this video I made that walks you through it step-by-step.