In part one of my six part Market Samurai video tutorial, you’ll understand exactly what keyword research is, how it will get you traffic to your website and how Market Samurai is going to help you save a ridiculous amount of time to get there quicker.
It’s important to lay out the foundation of Market Samurai so you’ll be able to attain the knowledge necessary to know why we do the things we do with Market Samurai.
An organized and revised transcript of the video can be found below.
What is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is research that bloggers, website owners and Internet marketers use to see exactly what people are typing into the search engines. In other words, they are looking for keyword popularity so that they can target these potential visitors.
After knowing approximately how many people are looking for a set of specific keyword phrases, they use this to their advantage to let the search engines know “Hey, my site is about ‘This Keyword Phrase'”.
Keyword research falls under the search engine optimization category in the Internet marketing world. It’s exactly what it sounds like. You’re optimizing your website for the search engines to see it, know it and share it.
Keyword research is HUGE especially as search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are constantly making their search algorithms a little more complex day by day to bring us the most accurate search results.
So in a nutshell, here’s how search engine optimization works. Google has something called “Spiders” that go and crawl a whole bunch of websites. They primarily read the content on the website and they’re able to get a good idea as to what the website is about. From there, they add it into their “index”, which is basically what we’re searching in Google. We’re searching through their index for the most accurate and relevant keyword phrases.
Now the most important question is how does Google organize the rankings of their websites? Everyone wants to be in the top 3 of Google and honestly, it just comes with a lot of hard work, maybe some luck and some wicked content. No one knows exactly what Google’s search algorithms are, but they have released guidelines to the public so we know how we ought to strive for great rankings:
Basic Search Engine Ranking Factors
- Great, unique and relevant content. This is where keyword research is massive. You’ll notice that I said unique as well. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to reinvent the wheel in your industry, but you shouldn’t be copying and pasting little pieces from other people’s blogs and making it your own.
- Quality backlinks. – Backlinks are links that come from other people’s websites to yours. It’s basically a website’s way of saying, “Hey! I vouch for these guys over here.” Now when I say quality, I don’t mean quantity. Maybe 6 or 7 years ago, quantity was huge and Internet marketers focused on building a whole bunch of crap links from directories, blog comments and a bunch of other ways that automated softwares could build for them.
Thankfully, the times have changed my friends! Now, more than ever, Google is really weeding out the crap from the great. Don’t get me wrong, quantity isn’t a bad thing, but you want that quantity of links to be from good, reputable sources. I guess you can kind of compare it to a popularity contest.
If your site is wickedly popular and there’s proof of it from a whole bunch of reputable websites telling the search engines, that it’s great, then you’re well on your way to better rankings in the search engines. I haven’t really scratched the surface of search engine optimization, but it’s good to get at least a basic understanding of it.
Now Why Market Samurai?
The reason why I chose Market Samurai over other search based keyword tools like Google keyword planner is simply because it does most of the work for you. It uses integrations from Google, Bing and Majestic to generate keywords for you, provide stats on thousands of keyword phrases and ultimately sets you up for the most accurate, thorough and efficient way to do some rock star keyword research! Market Samurai is the only online keyword research tool that I have stuck with for several years.
Now that we’re past the basic of Keyword Research and Search Engine Optimization, it’s time to kick on over to my second video on how Market Samurai works. You’ll see exactly what this software does and how it will help you get started with your keyword research. Before you head on over to the next video, it’s probably a good idea to either get the full version of Market Samurai with a 35% discount or download the free trial of market samurai. You’ll be all set up to work with me through my examples in my next video! I’ll be uploading some killer tips on how you can get more exposure and increase your ROI while working from home.
Things are about to get mind numbing in Part 2!