Now that you have decided to employ article marketing into you online marketing strategy and you have a list of targeted topics you want to write about, you are now ready for Part 2 of the MLM Article Marketing Blueprint Series, Keyword Research. Conducting Keyword research is the most essential component to your article achieving results in website rankings. You may be an expert in a certain subject area and write great content but if your targeted keywords are not properly researched or identified your article will be lost at sea.
When conducting keyword research there is a simple and free online tool that give you the identified keywords and phrases you need to target to your article subject. Simply go to Google and search for Keyword Research Tool and click on the Google Adwords Keywords Tool. When conducting your search you want to find relevant keywords that are targeted but at the same time not to competitive of a term. This is a balance only achieved through proper keyword research.
For the purposes of article writing your focus will be on targeting one or two keywords or phrases for each article. You will not achieve a decent ranking for any keywords if you are trying to rank for too many keyword phrases. If you are wondering how many words should be in a keyword phrase there are a couple of principles to remember. Usually key phrases with one or two keywords (short-tail phrases) have a much higher search volume but are not targeted. Phrases with three or more keyword combinations (long-tail phrases) have much lower search results but are targeted and specific. Ideally, a popular and relevant keyword phrase will be a three word combination often referred to as the Money Words.
Lets use an example when entering the phrase Business Opportunities into the keyword tool. That term was searched 49,500 times in one month on Google. When entering that phrase into Google there are 68,000,000 web pages with this term. You have no real chance to rank high for this keyword phrase because of the amount of competition. Also you don’t want to compete for this keyword in your article because it is not targeted as the term “Business Opportunities” may be the root keyword but needs to be expanded upon to find more targeted keyword combinations.
Now if your article targets MLM programs an example of a good keyword phrase could be: “Best MLM Company”. This phrase is targeted to MLM business and more specific than “Business Opportunities”. The phrase Best MLM Company has a monthly search volume over 1,600 and is competitive with about 522,000 other web pages. You will have a much better chance for a high ranking in the search engines when focusing on this key phrase in your article.
Enter targeted keywords into the research tool looking for a combination of 3 or 4 words. A key word phrase, having over 1,000 searches per month and a competition level of 100,000 – 300,000 competing web pages is the ideal phrase to target for your article. You will also want phrases that are being searched for on the internet. When you find a good three word key phrase that meets the criteria for search volume and number of competing web pages, do a Google search for your key phrase. Hopefully, you will also find that there is some paid advertisers (Pay Per Click Ads) also competing for this term. This is identified by the ads on top and the right column of the search results page.
Article marketing can be a successful enterprise for nearly any business in nearly every niche’ imaginable. While article marketing can be more challenging for those who are marketing to an entire country or several countries. Local businesses can certainly take advantage of article marketing to establish higher search engine ranking at a quicker pace as target keywords will be geographically targeted with much less competition.
Now that you know about proper keyword research and identifying target phrases, we will now focus our attention on using of these keyword phrases in our articles. Part III of the Article Marketing Success series will be about Writing Attention Grabbing Article Titles and Relevant Content.
Read the entire MLM Article Marketing Blueprint
Part 1: Article Marketing Introduction & Oerview
Part 3: Writing Article Titles & Content
MLM Article Marketing Blueprint (Part 4): Writing an Effective Author Resource Box
MLM Article Marketing Blueprint (Part 5): Submitting Your Article
