MoreNiche Affiliate SEO Tutorials

MoreNiche provides affiliate members with free resources and tools to help drive targeted traffic to their sites and effectively market their websites. Keyword research is the foundation for both onsite and offsite SEO and this guide will help you use them to their full benefit.

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Affiliate Keyword Research Guide

Keyword research is one of the most important phases in SEO. If you don’t spend time researching and planning what keywords you are going to target then everything after this point will be in vain.

To speed the process of keyword research up there are a selection of tools. Most of these query databases held by the search engine companies, nearly all of them are free or at least have some level of free access.

There are paid tools available but I must stress these are luxuries not essentials and you will often find free trials, access codes and demos available legally and readily online.

The most useful tool available in my opinion is Google’s own keyword research tool, located inside it’s Adwords program. You can find the external interface here.

The Google tool has a huge database of keywords and can show you a massive range of important information which you can sort manage and even geo-target. This functionality paired with the fact it is completely free to use make it by far the best tool available.

Using the tool is quite simple. First select what region you are targeting, you can see what you are currently searching as well as change it just above the tool.

If you are unsure you should generally look at US or UK figures since a massive proportion of most markets are base here. There is an option to get international search figures if you campaign will be targeting different countries.

Next you need to decide what kind of search you are doing, if you are looking at a competitor website you can use the “Website Content” radio button option and analyse a URL but in this example we are initially going to use the “Descriptive words or phrases” option.

Make sure this is checked as well the “Use synonyms” option and enter your primary keyword. This should be the keyword or phase that describes you product exactly. It should be as short as possible and not include adjectives unless 100% necessary.

For example use “widgets” at this stage and not “vivid blue widgets”.

Run the tool and then sort the results based on your own preferences, personally I think sorting them by Average Search Volume is the most handy as it stops you including search terms than mean nothing.

You can then take this list and export it to CSV for MS Excel or similar spreadsheet program and go through the list taking out keywords that have terrible search volume or that are irrelevant to your site.

If you then repeat this process for each major short tailed keyword your site is going to target you will have an extremely comprehensive list of short and long tailed keywords to target with both organic and paid SEM.

Golden Keywords

The next step is to look through your list and choose some golden keywords. Golden keywords are the ones that are most important to your site and in the case of SEO the first batch you are aiming to rank for.

You should choose golden keywords based on relevancy, competitiveness and potential traffic volume.

Relevancy to your site is something only you can judge, think carefully about whether the people searching for that keyword have what you want to offer. Be sure to consider different meanings of the word as well as language variation.

Traffic Volume details you already have, if you are weighing up two or three different keywords try using the SEOBook keyword tool to get a more accurate overview of how many people search for the keyword in each engine.

Competitiveness can only be judged by the level of sites that you will be trying to boot off the first page, check their backlinks, site age and other rankings. Are they a government site? Are they a blog? For more information on competitor analysis read this blog post.

The art of keyword research comes in balancing these three factors off against one another, you want a keyword that is going to bring in plenty of relevant traffic but is going to be fairly easy to rank for. It may take a long time to find them but it will be worth the effort.

After you have chosen ten golden keywords you are ready to move on to onsite optimisation, and then offsite optimisation and link building. Always keep your keyword sheets handy and expect them to evolve with your site. As you gain rankings for one golden keyword replace it with a more competitive one and keep trying for more and more relevant traffic.