Af­fil­i­ate Ar­ti­cle Mar­ket­ing ²⁄₇ - Key­word Research

How To Use Key­word Re­search To  Get Tar­geted Vis­i­tors ( = Buyers)

Here’s our sec­ond ar­ti­cle on af­fil­i­ate ar­ti­cle marketing.

This one and the fol­low­ing 4 in­stall­ments will ex­plain in de­tail the 5 step process to pro­mote af­fil­i­ate prod­ucts with articles.

1. Po­si­tion your ar­ti­cles where they can be found

2. Write head­lines that gain attention

3. Evoke in­ter­est in the ar­ti­cle body

4. Call to ac­tion in the re­source box

5. Get more vis­i­tors to visit your article

Us­ing Key­words to Po­si­tion Your Articles

In a nut­shell, key­words are just words or phrases that peo­ple use to search for any­thing and every­thing on­line. See­ing as we’re get­ting the nomen­cla­ture out of the way, ‘key­word den­sity’ is the amount of a cer­tain key­word per 100 words.

Key­words are im­por­tant – that can’t be stressed enough. Con­sid­er­ing that search en­gines are still the pri­mary way in which peo­ple look for any­thing on the in­ter­net, it means that peo­ple who are look­ing for things in what­ever niche you’re in, are go­ing to be do­ing so on search engines.

Thus, when talk­ing about po­si­tion­ing your ar­ti­cles, it es­sen­tially means po­si­tion­ing them in the rel­e­vant searches, so that they’re more likely to be found by the right people.

What hap­pens if this isn’t done? Well, say you had an ar­ti­cle about blog­ging for money, but it didn’t con­tain any key­words that are be­ing searched for a de­cent amount of times per month. In this sort of case, there would be no way that any­one would find your ar­ti­cle, and so it would go pretty much un­read and unattended.

Ad­mit­tedly, for long ar­ti­cles there in­ad­ver­tently ends up be­ing a key­word used here or there, but for re­li­able re­sults, you’re go­ing to want at least a 1% key­word den­sity (but not more than 3%).

First though, you’re go­ing to have to find the key­words that you in­tend to use.

Key­word Research

Ba­sic key­word re­search is re­ally pretty easy, and there isn’t too much about it that even a be­gin­ner can’t come to grips with. To start off with, the key­word re­search tool of choice is Google Ad­words Key­word Tool.

See­ing as Google is the most pop­u­lar search en­gine around, get­ting data from it seems to be a log­i­cal place to begin.

When con­duct­ing key­word re­search, there are three con­sid­er­a­tions in par­tic­u­lar that play an im­por­tant role:

1. Num­ber of Searches for a spe­cific keyword

Quite lit­er­ally, this is just the num­ber of searches per month. If a term has a high num­ber of searches, it means lots of peo­ple are look­ing for it, which def­i­nitely makes it a bet­ter choice.

2. Com­pe­ti­tion for a spe­cific keyword

Once you have a key­word that has a de­cent amount of searches, plug it into Google and search for it. When you get the re­sults, take note of how many there are. For in­stance, if there are 11,800,000 re­sults, then that means a lot of peo­ple are com­pet­ing for that keyword.

On the other hand, if you end up with some­thing like 1,800 re­sults, then there are very few com­pet­ing websites.

Need­less to say, with less com­pe­ti­tion, you stand a much bet­ter chance of ap­pear­ing on the first page of the search re­sults, which is re­ally what you should be aim­ing for. Once you’re there, you will no doubt see a dra­matic in­crease in your views.

3. Prof­itabil­ity of your keyword

Not all traf­fic is as prof­itable, and some­times, for cer­tain key­words, the traf­fic that is ob­tained just re­fuses to be con­verted. While there are a lot of fac­tors that can af­fect this, it isn’t too rel­e­vant as far as key­word re­search is concerned.

In­stead, it is bet­ter to know just one sim­ple test of the ‘prof­itabil­ity’ of a keyword.

When you per­form a search for the key­word to scope out the com­pe­ti­tion, take no­tice as to whether or not any ad­verts ap­pear. If they do, then that means some­one out there feels that it is worth spend­ing money on that keyword.

Ad­mit­tedly, this isn’t a 100% ac­cu­rate test, but it should suf­fice to give you a gen­eral idea.

By look­ing at these three ar­eas of key­word re­search, you should end up with a list of key­words which you can use to po­si­tion your ar­ti­cles well. Re­mem­ber: The idea is to get prof­itable key­words that have a de­cent num­ber of searches per month, and low competition.

Key­word En­riched Articles

With the key­words that you’ve ac­quired, you need to en­rich your ar­ti­cles with them. Mind you, there is a dif­fer­ence be­tween en­rich­ing and stuff­ing, and search en­gines are smart enough to rec­og­nize when some­one is try­ing to fool them.

In­sert key­words in such a way that they flow smoothly through the ar­ti­cle, and fol­low the 1% to 3% key­word den­sity rule closely. For each ar­ti­cle, it is gen­er­ally ad­vis­able to have one ‘short’ key­word of about 2 to 3 words, and two ‘long’ key­words of 4 or more words.

If you do all of this, your ar­ti­cles should be show­ing up for the key­words that you’re tar­get­ing, and so, all that re­mains is to con­sider the other as­pects of ar­ti­cle marketing.

In the next in­stall­ment of the se­ries we’ll talk about how to make peo­ple ac­tu­ally read your article.