Targeting keywords is a great idea unfortunately 90% of people who “target keywords” don’t really know what they’re doing and get sub-par results. Hopefully this will help clear it up so you can start benefiting from more search engine traffic and better adsense revenues.

5 Points To Target Keywords

Have the keyword in your title (the nearer to the start the better).

Include the keywords in your page headings (these have more weight to google than regular text).

Have the keywords in the Page description (once again feature near the start of the description).

And obviously have the keywords in the post (about a 2-4% keyword density is good).

Make sure you interlink with keywords (eg when linking to the page from another post don’t say “click here for more about keyword”, say “check out keyword for more info”).

How To Choose Keywords To Target

Go to Google Keyword Tool and type in your terms.

Then click “show estimated average cpc”, and then match type by “exact”.

Now you have a list of keywords and an idea of which ones pay well for advertising (if you click on “Estimated Average CPC” it will arrange the results so you can see the highest paying keywords first”)

Here are the two factors you should consider when choosing keywords to target:

Competition

If a keyword has a lot of searches but there is extremely tough competition it will be hard to rank well even if you effectively target the keywords. So once you find the good keywords type them into google and see how many results there (less is better, 1 million is bad). Also have a look at the quality of the top page results, tips on how to do this can be found in How To Dial In Your Keywords – Part 2.

Look for key-phrases. 3 word phrases are much easier to target than single words. Although there might be less total searches for these keywords you will find it much easier to rank on the top page and will get more traffic quicker.

The CPC

If you are targeting a bunch of keywords with a low CPC (cost per click for adwords ad) you might be able to get a lot of traffic but you wont make much from your adsense. So if you have adsense on your site and want to make more money have a look at targeting keywords that pay well. The trick is finding high paying keywords with a lot of searches and low competition.