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Outsourcing Keyword Research - The Key To Higher Search Engine Ranking
By Jason Jantzi (c) 2007

The first and most important step to achieving higher search
engine ranking is to become crystal clear on which keywords you
want to target.

Why does this matter? Because people don't simply "arrive" at
your website. They have to find you. And the easiest and most
common tool everybody uses is the search engine. Google. Yahoo.
MSN. And what do they type into these search engines in order
to find you? Keywords, of course.

Your job is to determine what keywords your ideal customer
would type into the search engines, and then build your search
engine optimization strategy to target those keywords.

The process for determining the best keywords to target
involves a fair bit of legwork and therefore is a task I like to
outsource. However in order to outsource it effectively, you
need to be able to communicate to your contractor exactly what
steps you expect him or her to perform.

Many people think they know how to do keyword research, but
rarely will they do the steps that really matter. Why? Because
they're tedious. Tedious, but necessary.

Here's what you need to do:

1 - Provide a seed keyword - what is it all about?

A seed keyword is basically a root word. If you want to find
out the best keywords to target on the subject of world-class
golf courses, your seed keyword might be "golf course". This
gives your keyword researcher a solid idea of where to start.

2 - Provide context - what are you looking for?

Another important piece of information to provide is what types
of words you are looking for. Are you wanting to target names of
golf courses, like "Pebble Beach golf course"? Are you wanting
to target locations of golf courses, like "golf courses in
Wisconsin"? Or do you even care? Maybe you just want any phrase
that contains "golf course". Whatever your intentions are is
fine. It's just at this step that you provide some boundaries
for what you're looking for.

3 - Provide a target - how many keywords do you want?

This is a pivotal area. Most junior keyword researchers will
run off and bring you a list of a thousand keywords all of which
have some loose connection with your seed keyword. Wonderful.
What are you going to do with those?

In later steps when you go to implement your search engine
optimization strategy you're going to discover that you can
really only optimize a page for one or two keywords. This means
you will need to create at least 500 pages to use these 1000
keywords. Worse, you will need to acquire a competitive number
of inbound links to each of these pages in order to outrank your
competition and get any visitors from the search engines. This
is a huge amount of work, which almost certainly won't get done.
So your SEO efforts will fail.

Don't do this.

Instead, provide a target to your keyword researcher. Far
better for you to have 20, 30 or maybe even 50 keywords that are
highly relevant and that you can reasonably compete for than a
list of 1000 that are out of your reach.

What you want your keyword researcher to do is find the
information that will help you decide which keywords to target.

4 - Provide directions - what specific info do you need?

In order to provide effective directions, you need to be clear
on what information you'll have to weigh in order to decide if a
keyword is worth targeting. This means you need to understand
how search engines rank your web pages compared with your
competition.

First of all, search engines look at your individual web pages.
They determine how relevant your web page is to different
keywords, which they derive from the content and composition of
your page. That's how they determine whether you're even "in the
running" to show up when people type certain keywords into the
search engine.

Then they need to determine how important your web page is
compared to the millions of other somewhat-relevant pages in
their indexes. They do this by looking at how many other
websites link to your page and to your website generally, and
how important these other sites are, in their eyes.

This all leads to a democratic "voting-style" assessment of
which pages will be displayed in the top search results on the
search engines.

So, assuming that you are going to create pages that are highly
relevant to your keywords anyway, your one main concern is how
difficult it will be to out-rank your competition on the search
engine results. This can be measured by how many good quality
inbound links they have to the page you want to out-rank.

How do you determine this? By using a tool like the Link
Popularity feature on MarketLeap. This tool allows you to type
in the addresses of several web pages and it will find out how
many inbound links there are on the major search engines. This
gives you an idea of the number of links you need to beat in
order to outrank your competition.

This isn't an exact science, of course. Search engine ranking
algorithms are closely guarded secrets. But in broad strokes,
this tells you how easy or difficult it will be to compete for a
given keyword.

So, here is the process I like to ask my keyword researchers to
follow:

(a) use a keyword research tool like Wordtracker to come up
with an initial list of 1000 keywords by using the seed keyword
I described in step 1 above.

(b) manually go through that list and select only the
highly-relevant keywords according to the context I described in
step 2 above. This probably pares the list down to 50 or so.
(See step 3 above.)

(c) for each of the 50 keywords on this shortlist, individually
go to Google and type each keyword in to the search engine and
look at the top 10 search results.

(d) for each of these top 10 search results (for each of the 50
keywords), go to Marketleap and type in each of the web pages
and record the number of inbound links in a spreadsheet. It
isn't important to record the URL's of each of the competitors,
just their search result rank.

For example, if the keyword was "Wisconsin golf courses", then
you would visit Google, type that in, and for the top 10
results, you would visit Marketleap and do a Link Popularity
check for each of the results. Then in a spreadsheet you would
record how many inbound links there were for result #1, 2, 3,...,
10.

When all is said and done, you should have a spreadsheet with
50 keywords, and in columns next to each keyword, you should
have an indication of how many inbound links you'll have to beat
in order to have a shot at the top 10 search results for each
keyword. This is going to make it very straightforward for you
to pick the easiest keywords to compete on right away.

Now, if this sounds like a tedious manual chore, it is! This is
why it is a favorite task to outsource. Chances are, if you're
stuck doing it yourself, you'll take shortcuts or just not do it
at all. Far better to outsource this to a reliable keyword
researcher who will follow directions and produce the output you
request.

At the end of the day, you need to know which keywords to
target and there is only one way to get this information:
diligent research. Outsource this properly, and you are well on
your way to better search engine ranking for your website.
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Jason Jantzi has used outsourcing to achieve better search engine
ranking for years. Download his free Hiring Out 101 outsourcing
guide and learn how to skyrocket your Internet businesss by
letting others do the work. Download free at
http://www.HiringOut.com.
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