Everyone online wants their website to rank in Google.  The reason being, it would generate free traffic for your websites.  So, what does it mean to rank in Google?  It means that your website will show up in the top 10 search results of a certain keyword or keyword phrase.  There are different ways to rank in Google’s top 10 spots.  Your site can rank with blogging or article writing or some other form of content marketing, but every one of these processes begins in the same place.  In order to rank in Google, or any search engine, you have to know what keyword or keyword phrase you want to rank for.

How do you choose your keywords?

There are literally billions of keyword to choose from, so how do you choose?  The very first step is to do some keyword research. I like to use the free Google keyword tool.  Use it to check out some keywords for the traffic that you want to attract to your website, and you can see how many searches per month that specific keyword gets. You will also see over 100 other related keywords and their monthly search volume.  Starting out, you wouldn’t want to try and rank for the keywords that have a search volume of greater than 2000. In fact, the lower the search volume, the easier it will be for you to rank in the top 10 search results.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Once you narrow down what specific keywords you want to rank for, there is a little bit more research that can be very helpful to you in writing your article and knowing how many back-links you’ll need to rank in the top 10 search results.  Use the SEO Firefox add-on to study other websites.  It’s a free tool created by SEObook so that you can study some behind the scenes information about different websites.  You can find information such as how old the site is, how many back links it has, what major directories it is listed in, and a lot of other useful information.

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
Go back to Google, and search the specific keyword that you want to write your article about. Then look at the top 10 websites that show up. Study the information on the websites. Get some ideas for your articles, but never copy them exactly. Also use the SEO tools you’ve just set up to study the SEO side of these websites.   With all of the information that you can gather with these tools, it will make your content marketing more effective.  You’ll know if it’s a waste of your time to target certain keywords before you even start writing.  There are even some nice tools to use after you’ve done some of the work.

Once you start your content marketing, you can check the SEO statistics of your own website using these exact same tools.  You’ll know which keywords are working, and which ones will need a little more work.  The tool that I like to use for this is called the “rank checker”.  It’s also a free tool that comes from SEObook, and you can see where any website ranks in the search engines for specific keywords or keyword phrases.  The rank checker will show the websites rank for Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

All of these free tools will help you begin your online keyword research, continue with extensive research after the fact, and should make your content marketing a much easier process.  Content marketing is a great way to generate free traffic to any website, and is a marketing strategy that shouldn’t be overlooked by any marketer no matter what level of experience they have.  Now that you know how to research your keywords, I’d like to share with you an article marketing strategy that I use to rank in the search engines for almost any keyword that I want.

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