7 Keyword Selection Tips

The other day I posted "7 Keyword Research Tips" and I want to continue on that theme with today's topic - 7 Keyword Selection Tips. Once again this came from an article on Searchengineland.com that I've excerpted, numbered, and added a bit of my own here and there.

By the way, on the left is a graphic illustrating the steps for researching keywords, if you need a review.
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"Once you have a list of keyword candidates, you must cull through it to find your keywords. This is where a lot of people throw up their hands and give up or try to over-simplify the process. Going back and forth between dozens of export files from different keyword tools is not practical, so it's best to use a spreadsheet to compile a master table.

1. Compile your research into a master table so you can sort it and filter it.

2. I sort my keyword candidate by the number of words in each keyword or phrase first, then by the number of searches. 

3. Set aside or check off relevant one-, two- and three-word phrases.

4. Set aside or check off embedded keywords. Before Chris Anderson coined The Long Tail, I used embedded keywords to describe longer key phrases that contained shorter keywords. Search for each relevant one-, two- and three-word keyword, then mark the longer keywords that contain the shorter keywords.

At this point, what is left will be like looking for diamonds in a trash heap. There will be lots on non-relevant words and words with too little traffic. Comprehensive research is important, but now it is time to get practical.

5. Set some limits. Depending on how much traffic the website I am optimizing receives already, I will set a lower traffic limit between 100 and 1,000. The more traffic my website is getting, the higher the limit I set. Anything below the limit gets culled.

6. Review each keyword candidate you have left. If it is relevant, mark it or set it aside.

7. At the end, copy all the keywords you marked or set aside into one table. These are your keyword candidates."

This takes a good amount of work, but it's worth it since the right keywords can get you found while the wrongs ones will bring you nothing. You can read the entire article here.

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