First off this post on finding the best keywords for your website, blog, etc is very different for me, since I normally post on entrepreneur ideas & how to start businesses. But it is EPICALLY important if you are involved online, which you should be at the very least with a blog platform for personal branding.

This post comes from 2 years of me fumbling around when it comes to choosing keywords and finding the best keywords that serve my niche. In the last 3 months I’ve started to study keyword research and have finally gotten the ‘tools’ needed for choosing the best keywords for my websites. I decided to share them because I would have given my left foot for this information, in an easy “Maren Proof”* formula two years ago.

The “Maren Proof” Guide to Finding Your Best Keywords

1. First, my lovelies, we must decide WHAT your website/blog is aiming for. Are you trying to sell tomato by products or build a personal branding platform that will push your public speaking career to the next level. Write out, in a sentence or two, the point of your blog and then try to find someone else to read it.

If it makes sense to them – good. If it doesn’t, it’s back to the drawing board. An example: Escaping the 9 to 5 is a blog dedicated to teaching people how to start a business that will change their life.

2. Now, we’ve got our purpose (i.e. mission statement) and our URL hopefully (if not here are some resources are choosing URLs properly) – it’s time to bring on the keywords. First go to Google Keyword Tool and start entering a few terms & phrases that you think has to do with your site. I.E. ostrich breeding, eco friendly, bank loans.

You’ll notice tons of results will come up, go to the right hand corner & change the ‘Match Type’ from Broad to Exact.

This gives you a far better understanding of how many actual searches are going on each month for the keywords. Now once you have that it’s time to look at keywords that you feel as if your content relates to (or will relate to) and choose 5-10 of them by hitting ‘Add’. Also if a keyword has like 100-1000 searches a month you may not want to bother UNLESS you are doing a mini-site (read more about mini sites here).

3. Now it’s time to go to Google & query each keyword with quotation marks around it

4. Look at the results from 1-6 and get an idea of what your competition is. Ostrich.com is going to be a big one to compete with since they are obviously so niche specific, so if your site is just about “Farming” and one of your keywords is Ostrich you probably won’t be able to rank near them. But if you are dedicated to your ostrich farming business then, by all means, let’s carry on.

5. You just need to make it into the top 3,4,5 or 6th slot to really make a difference – once we are they we can worry about how to get to number one. To do so we must know how secure the people in those spots are. So let’s check out number 3 in the results page, the tantalizing article on Recent Developments in Ostrich Farming – now this may be a real crowd pleaser so we have to do two things:

A. Click on the link and get a general sense of the page

B. Check how many back links that page gets… which is far more important than whether or not it’s pretty   (teaser alert: IT ISN’T).

6. So copy the URL http://www.fao.org/docrep/V6200T/v6200T02.htm and hop on over to Yahoo.com (not Google, Yahoo).  In the search bar it in like so…

That is the word Link + : + the URL

You may want to go over to Yahoo and do it yourself a few times to get the hang of it – remember, this is the Maren proof guide. So forgive me if I’m going Maren speed.

7. Press “Web Search” and its off to the races! You’ll see a screen like this

And you’re there! Now you should see (unless this keyword has gotten CRAZY competitive since I wrote this post) about 5 back links to the site that is currently holding the n. 3 position in Google for “Ostrich Farming” – that is NOTHING and means there is a great chance you can totally dominate on that keyword. You can actually get more specific and click the ‘except from this domain’ bar on top – so that you don’t see any links Fao.org has given itself.

8. Now that we know “Ostrich Farming” is a keyword ripe for the picking – you should go back and do this with all your chosen keywords – to see which really are the best keywords for your niche. Rate them from 1-10 with the first being the easiest to dominate. If you’re in a more competitive niche (like this site which is on starting a small business – haha see that clever trick!) then you may see several thousand backlinks on the first page of Google. But never fear, you can win – it’ll just take you longer and you’ll have to do more SEO then those lucky ducky Ostrich people.

Now if you are indeed in the Ostrich Farming/Mating game I did you a favor! So you better send me a big ole Ostrich egg so I can make the world’s largest breakfast sandwich with it (don’t eeew me you know you want to see a scrambled Ostrich egg as much as I do!).

But if you are in another niche that means you have to go out and do this yourself, but I promise you it is SOO worth it. I fumbled for far too long with just guessing at what my best keywords were. But now that I’ve found them it will change everything. I expect my traffic to start growing by leaps and bounds. So please, trust me, this stuff is boring but it is what you need to do BEFORE you can build an empire online or off. Everyone should have some sort of website in this day and age, even if it is just a basic portfolio or blog.

Make your presence count online and the sooner you find your keywords the sooner you can start monetizing your site or benefiting from the tribe that will be built around it.

For more on this topic I strongly suggest Glen Allsopp’s amazing eBook “Cloud Living” I have read it through several times and it has infinitely helped me when it comes to learning how to monetize my site, learning how to choose stellar keywords and figuring out how I pick a truly profitable niche. Glen is an internet legend who has made tens of thousands on mini-sites and runs his own very successful blog at www.Viperchill.com – so you know he knows his stuff!

*Apologies to all you other Marens out there, this is not a slam against Marens as a community – just a dig at this Maren who is epically hopeless when it comes to most things tech. When I say something is a Maren proof guide you have my assurance that despite all my best attempts at failure, I actually got through this guide – meaning that you (who are no doubt a faster learn than I) will breeze through it at awesome speeds.

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