Top Tips for Keyword Research

Keyword research is an extremely valuable tool. It lets you find and research particular search terms people have entered into the search engines when doing any sort of search for information, products or services. This is invaluable for optimising websites, because if you can see before you exactly what people are searching for,
then you can build your website and its content so that the search engines index these carefully selected keywords. This will greatly assist you in driving targeted traffic toward your site. It's simpler than you may think, and there are quite a few easy to use resources available to help you pursue this type of research.
As a Virtual Assistant, you'll want to optimize your own sites, and it's also more than likely that several of your clients will ask you to carry out research for them too. If you discover that you're performing keyword research often, then you might consider investing in a program that will take care of some of the time consuming steps for you. However, you should always know how to do it manually, as these programmes aren't infallible, and it's always good practice to check the results you're getting periodically.

Here's a simple guide on how to perform a keyword search using Google:

1. Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You don't need to be signed up for AdWords to do this. It's an external search that you can carry out for free.

2. Enter the Keywords that you want to search for - in this case I am using "Virtual Assistant", then type in the captcha character text (if necessary) and press the Get Keyword Ideas button.

3. You will be given a list of suggested keywords and related keywords from the starting keyword that you entered.

4. As you can see, the tool has returned a list which I have sorted by local search volume for April. This tells us that there is very high competition for the word Virtual Assistant, and it also tells us that there were 135,000 searches against this term in April. We're looking for a word that we can use to get ranked high up in the search engines so we can get more traffic to our site. So if we look at this list, a realistic target is to find a word with at least 100 searches a day. The competition for Virtual Assistant Services is still fairly high, but if we now go over to Google, we can take a look at our potential competition.

5. So, let's do a search on "Virtual Assistant Services", and make sure you use the quotations marks or you'll get results returned for any combination of those words.

Here, as you can see this page tells us that there are 57,700 pages ranked for this combination of words. This is not too high for you to be able to compete to get your page ranked for this word - with a little work of course.
I'm not saying that this is the ideal term for you to attempt to rank your Virtual Assistant business. This is just an example of what you might want to look at. Be creative and 'think outside the box' with your ideas. What terms do you think your clients would search for? You're going to want to repeat this process to find several keywords that you can utilise for establishing your Search Engine Index niche.

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Link Exchange for SEO: How Do You Do It?

Link exchange (swapping links between sites to gain higher placement on search engines) is one of the good old proven off page optimization techniques. Although it's not as powerful as it used to be back in the early days of search engine optimation, it's still a very effective method to build authority of a website and improve its standing in the search engine rankings. Let's see what exact steps make for a successful link exchange campaign.

Link exchange (as well as any link building technique in that respect) is based on two cornerstones: quality and relevancy. You need to make sure that the websites you exchange links with are trusted and established sources on the web and are in the same niche as your website or are complementary in some way. That brings us to the first stage of linking campaign.

Keyword Research

To find relevant websites you need to identify the keywords these websites can be found by. Take your general list of keywords that you target in your search engine optimization campaign and expand it with keywords from neighboring niches. For example if your website is about guitars, you can also include keywords that describe effect pedals, amps, musical theory, picks, recording gear, etc. Once you've come up with a list of keywords you can go on to the second step of link exchange.

Searching For Link Partners

Running a search on Google and other search engines is the most obvious and a very effective way to search for relevant link partners. Search for the keywords from your list and you're sure to get tons of relevant results. Don't try to focus just on the first page of search results. In fact you would be better off starting with the second or third page, because websites that are already at the top are less likely to be interested in link exchange.

Pick The Best Link Sources

Once you have a list of relevant websites it's time for quality control. Although every relevant link is good for your rankings, links are not valued equally. Search engines tend to put more trust in .gov and .edu sites, therefore textual links from these domains are more effective. Don't be obsessed with PR though keeping in mind that it's just one of the factors in the ranking algorithm. It's a good idea to check the linking profile of a website, i.e. the websites it links to and those that link to it. Exchange links only with websites that are in a 'good neighborhood' and are not associated with dubious sites.

Set Up Links To Partners

Before you jump into sending out link requests to webmasters of the websites on your list it's better to make the first step towards your link partnership and link to them from your website. Set up a directory of links to your potential link partners and mention them with the exact page URL, anchor text and description when asking for a link back. To speed up the generation of your links directory you can use SEO software.

Send Out Link Exchange Requests

Link exchange requests are something every webmaster receives every day. A lot of them are automatically generated by link exchange bots, therefore if you want to increase your chances to get a link try to sound as personal and particular as you possibly can. Address each person by the name, mention their website and by all means be polite.

Manage Your Link Exchange Campaign

Getting a link back to your site is not the end of the link exchange process. It's rather a beginning of a new stage. Now you need to make sure that the link stays in place with the right anchor text and description. When you have hundreds of links it's just impossible to monitor them all by hand. The best way to manage your links is by using special link exchange software. It'll save you a lot of time and effort and will check your links faster and more accurately. Such tools are also very useful on all other stages of link exchange: when searching for partners, evaluating the value of each potential link, sending out link requests and so on.

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