I have used around a dozen Keyword Research tools both free as well as paid. However the best one I have found is Google keyword Tool. It is very accurate and free to use. However you need some experience to better understand how to use it. Just spend more and more time to experiment different ideas for a keyword and you will see your desired results coming up. A quick short tip is to use MS Word’s Thesaurus facility. Write your word and then hit Shift+F7 after highlight it and it will give you alternative words with similar meaning. Try those words in Google Keyword Tool and you can get lots of new keywords to target for your website.

Long Tail Keywords

It is a common problem that most of Pakistani webmasters don’t understand how to use Keyword Research Tools. For instance, when they do search on keyword “Gadget” they think about targeting high traffic keywords like “cool gadgets”, “tech gadgets”, “electronic gadgets” etc. Hence they fall down because they face immense completion on these keywords. Even if they can achieve first page position on such tough keywords, they won’t get much traffic. So what they did wrong?

First of all, understand that monthly searches referred in google keyword tool are not actual traffic on that keyword. It is an accumulated sum of keywords that include this keyword. For instance, google shows monthly searches for “tech gadgets” as 135K. It sounds like more than 4,000 searches per day. However it is not correct. Google includes searches of “best tech gadgets”, “hi tech gadgets”, “electronic tech gadgets” etc in this keyword. Hence 135K represents monthly searches of all keywords having “tech gadgets” as a part of it. People searching on “tech gadgets” exactly wouldn’t be much more than 200 searches per day. Hence targeting this keyword will result in tough competition and low return.

So what should we do to get lower completion and higher return? Focus more on Long Tail Keywords than short one or two word keyword. In our example, “spy gadgets for the evil genius” is a long tail keyword. Even you can try to target “cool gadgets for men” instead of “cool gadgets” And target “tech gadgets 2009” instead of “tech gadgets” and vice versa. You might have noticed a lower search volume for these keywords but they will not be tough in completion and with a quality content page, you can easily get ranking in top 5 positions which will result in traffic more quickly coming to your website than if you have targeted some high competition keyword.

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Here are these Google Ranking Factors as per my experience,

Must Have Ranking Factors

1. Keyword must be in the Title of Page
2. Keyword must be in the Headings (h1, h2, h3) in the page.
3. Keyword should be in Meta Tags (Keywords and Description)
4. Variation of Keyword must be present on the same page (related words)
5. The Keyword Density (frequency of keyword) should be around 2% of total word count.
6. Contents must be of related to keyword and high quality.
7. Back Links from higher PR domains with anchor text as this Keyword.
8. Page Rank of your Home Page should be 3+. And your page’s link should be on your home page.
9. If someone finds you in google search, he/she should be satisfied with your contents. That means he/she should not search same term again on google at least within next one hour.
10. Contents must not be Duplicating or found major portion on some other website.

Should Have Ranking Factors

1. Keyword should be in URL of website
2. Keyword should be in Domain Name
3. Keyword should be in first paragraph.
4. If images are used in that page, ALT tag should contain this keyword.
5. At least 10 back links from good PR websites with this keyword as anchor text.
6. Age of Domain should be more than 1 year
7. Location and Server should be in the area where majority of your target users live. If you are targeting USA visitors, make sure your domain should be hosted in USA server.
8. Keyword should be closely related to your domain’s primary purpose.
9. Domain TLD should be .com/.net/.org.

Nice to Have Ranking Factors

1. Use Keyword in your page in all formats (bold, italic, underline, colored etc)
2. Link other pages of your site with this page based upon relevancy. Similarly place this page’s link (with keyword as anchor text) on other related pages of same site.
3. Update your website regularly
4. Get back links from sites like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory
5. Reduce Outgoing links as much as you can.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Please suggest more factors if you can.

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