Finding niche keywords.

A niche keyword has

1. an above threshold search volume
2. for the targeted locality of your website
3. with potential for top page positioning on the search engines results page
4. in the relevant country.

 If you're in the United States than you will want to be near the top for Google.com.

If you're in the United Kingdom than you want to be near the top for Google.co.UK.

 If you are a professional person, you may be perfectly happy, if just one person finds you through your website each month whereas if you are a big enyclopedia website, such as Wikipedia, then an additional one search per month would be of no real value to you.

To begin with, we can formulate a few keywords by suggestions of our own. But we then need to expand these by the use of a keyword suggestion tool. My personal preference is to use the Google keyword tool. There are a number of excellent keyword suggestion tools. The majority are commercial and require the payment. One of the advantages of the Google keyword tool. Is that it is free of charge, and in my view, it is a particularly good keyword suggestion tool, because Google has the largest database of searches.

You can hear more about the various keyword suggestion tools on video 8 of my series.

You can get into the Google keyword tool, either by typing in the URL into the address bar or by searching for Google keyword tool. When you arrive at the tool, Google automatically locates your country, which for me is the United Kindom and English but you can edit a number of options. I am going to put in the keyword 'wholesale' and we have to put in a capture, and then we'll get the keyword ideas. We are then provided with a list of related keywords, including the word 'wholesale'. The tool shows us the search volume, both locally, which in my case would be the United Kingdom and globally. The tool automatically assumes that we are looking for broad search. A broad search  such a wholesale would include 'wholesale suppliers', and anyone looking for wholesale or suppliers but if we want the visitors looking for the combined keywords of 'wholesale suppliers' we need to click on 'exact', You can see wholesale suppliers is 49,500 for broad search and on exact it reduces to 1600.

If we scroll down, there is an option to export the data for CSV and import it into Excel. Further down, there is an option for additional keywords that we may wish to consider such as 'dropship' and 'dropshipper', wholesale incorrectly spelt.

Here, I have downloaded a list of keywords from the Google keyword tool and selected those that I want to show you for further analysis. You can see the local search volume per month and the global search volume and these are clearly desirable keywords. I have then selected these keywords, and we'll import them into my program Keyword SEO Pro.

Having found a list of potential keywords for my website. I now want to know how difficult it would be to compete for top page positioning on Google. I am going to enter the list of keywords, and I wish to analyse for Google.co.uk, it will automatically be an English and then for pages from the UK. When I click on 'go' Keyword SEO Pro will begin its analysis.

From my research it would appear that the PageRanks of the HomePage of a website is the critical factor in determining the positioning of webpages on the search engine results page. Here we have the Keyword SEO Pro output for this data for our series of keywords. The research that led me to determine the importance of HomePage PageRank is described in video 3 of this series.

Many keywords, particularly if they have commercial value, are highly sought after and the competition is fierce. If we look at 'wholesale prices', the lowest PageRank is 5 and the highest is 9 with an average PageRank of 6.6 It is unusual for the average PageRank to be less than four. The closer to 4 the average PageRank, the better our chance of being able to successfully compete.

In this line for 'wholesale mobile phone' one page has a HomePageRank of 2; this is on wholesalepages.co.uk and I want to look at that page the actual pages itself in greater detail for analysis and to see the chances of us being able to successfully compete. It is by showing us some relatively low HomePage PageRank in the top 10 for a keyword that Keyword SEO Pro proves to be so effective in demonstrating keywords that might be me, niche keywords, keywords with reasonable volumes as detected by the keyword suggestion tool, and with relatively low competitive strength.

This is the web page in position 8 for the term 'wholesale mobile phone' and here I've entered the URL and this is the page and you can see it is actually a directory of wholesale suppliers.

In search engine optimisation, we must consider:-

1. On-page optimisation, the content of the page and the underlying coding.
2. On-site optimisation - the linking between pages on the website.
3. Off-page optimisation - the linking from other websites.

I use website auditor to assess URLs for on-page optimisation. This page on website auditor has an optimisation score of 28.1%, which suggests that we may be able to do perhaps a little better.

I recommend SEO Spyglass to evaluate off-page optimisation. This program has picked up 14 links. One of them is external on ezinearticles.com, the second is the HomePage: These two have PageRanks and provide link value. The other 12 are internal pages with no PR, and therefore no link value.

As with the Google keyword tool, Keyword SEO Pro allows us to export data, and then to import it into a datasheet such as Excel, and in this slide, I have amalgamated the two sets of data. The red arrow indicates the page we've been analysing.