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It’s Easy to Find Quick-to-Rank Keywords
Never having backlinks or even your content is the most important thing in SEO. You need to first select the right keywords to aim before any of those can even get into the frame. By choosing keywords that are easy to rate, you’ll start getting traffic and sales right away, instead of waiting months to see results.
How do you choose keywords that you can rank for quickly?
Go for Long Tail Keywords
Generally speaking, you’ll want to try keywords which are three or more phrases. Try keywords with at least 1,000 searches per month, more if you have a website in PR 2 or higher.
Do your keyword search for an exact match. Put your keyword in quotes, in other words, “this is my keyword,” which will give you the exact number of competing websites.
Ideally, this number should be under 50,000.
Evaluating the Top Five
Your primary goal is to get as fast as possible in the top five positions. Under the top five, there is so little traffic that it’s not worth shooting for.
The lower the top five, the faster the ranking chances for those keywords are.
Next, determine whether or not the top five intentionally try to rank for the keyword you’re targeting. There’s a good chance they’ve just ranked by accident, which will make pushing them off a lot easier.
Do they have the keyword in their title tag which you are targeting? Are their meta keyword tags the keyword? If so, you’re in for the harder fight. If not, it will be much easier to get going.
How many backlinks do you have for the competition? To find out, use Yahoo! Web Explorer. (Google masks the connections and is misleading for competitive SEO research purposes.)
Gage the PageRank of your rival, too, using a PageRank checker. Then look at the age of the domain, as well as the number of pages on the domains of your rival.
The easiest keywords to rate for will have competitors who don’t target the keyword directly, who don’t have many backlinks, who have low PageRank and/or low domain age.
Try to Find Keywords without the Root
Some keywords containing the keyword “source” will have a lot more competition than those not.
For instance, keywords such as “best diet” or “low carb diet” or “six-pack abs diet” will be highly competitive if you’re in the diet niche.
Keywords, on the other hand, that do not have the word “diet” in them will have far less competition.
If you combine these strategies, you’re going to have a solid strategy to find keywords you can rank for in two to six weeks. Remember that SEO is as much an art as it is a science and that having fast rankings is just as much a feature of putting up a lot of pages that target different keywords as it picks good keywords.