Maximise Your Results with Optimal KEYWORD Research

June 2, 2009

Keyword research is an absolutely necessary tool. It gives you the ability to find and research specific search terms which people individually enter into the search engines when performing any sort of search for information, products or services. This is incredibly helpful for optimising websites, because if you can see what people are searching for, then you can quickly set up your site and its content so that the search engines index these specifically chosen keywords. This will tip the scales in your favour when it comes to driving targeted traffic toward your website. It’s not overly complex, and there are several really easy to use applications available to help you pursue this sort of research.

As a Virtual Assistant, you’ll want to optimize your own in-house websites, and it’s also quite possible that many of your clients will ask you to look into this sort of research for them as well. If you discover that you’re performing keyword search often, then you might consider investing in a program that will take care of some of the time consuming steps for you. However, keep in mind that you should always understand how to do it without additional software assistance, as these programmes certainly aren’t foolproof, and it’s always a responsible practice to occasionally verify the results too.

Here’s a quick guide on how to do a keyword search with Google:

1. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You don’t need to be signed up for AdWords to do this. It’s an external search that you can carry out for free.

2. Enter the Keywords that you want to search for – in this case I am using “Virtual Assistant”, then type in the captcha character text (if necessary) and press the Get Keyword Ideas button.

3. You will be presented with a detailed list of potential keywords and similar keywords from the initial keyword that you inserted.

4. As you can see, the tool has returned a list which I have sorted by local search volume for April. This tells us that there is very high competition for the word Virtual Assistant, and it also tells us that there were 135,000 searches against this term in April. We’re looking for a word that we can use to get ranked high up in the search engines so we can get more traffic to our site. So if we view this list, a good target is to locate a word with at least 100 searches per day. The competition for Virtual Assistant Services is still fairly high, but if we now go over to Google, we can take a look at our potential competition.

5. So, let’s do a search on “Virtual Assistant Services”, and make sure you use the quotations marks or you’ll get results returned for any combination of those words.

At this point, as you can clearly see, this page shows us that there are (at the time this article was written) 57,700 pages ranked for this particular combination of words. It’s not impossible for you to be able to compete with your page ranked for this specific word – you just need to put in a bit of work.

I’m not saying that this is the ideal term for you to attempt to rank your Virtual Assistant business. This is just an example of what you may want to check out. Be creative and ‘think outside the box’ with your ideas. What terms do you think your clients would search for? You’re going to want to repeat this process to find several keywords that you can utilise for establishing your Search Engine Index niche.

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, a cutting edge Executive Virtual Assistant Service which assists organisations and enterprising individuals with every detail of their entrepreneurial aspirations. Do you want to peruse some further information on these incredible online business building success strategies? Enter the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance as soon as possible!

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Posted by Virtual Miss Friday | Filed Under **Business**, **Internet**, **Marketing**, **eBusiness**, Advertising, Development, Promotion