Next I’m going to head to Google.com in a new tab and there in inverted commas like this, “Scuba Diving Equipment” type that in to the search box and hit the enter key or just click on search.
What I want to find here, by doing this, is the actual number of other websites competing to use this long tailed keyword “Scuba Diving Equipment”
Ideally I want the number to be less than 200,000 other sites using this as a keyword for their own websites, even better if I can get the figure down to 70,000 but if I’m really lucky, I want to find the number returned at less than 30,000
So, what do we find?
Ok, so “Scuba Diving Equipment” competing number of websites is: Results 1 - 10 of about 377,000 for “Scuba Diving Equipment”
That’s just a bit too high, so I’m going to continue down the list on the Google Keyword Tool to see if I can find another long tailed keyword, with more than 500 searches per month and a more reasonable number of sites using said long tailed keyword.
My purpose in doing this, is that I want my article that I’m about to write to stand the best possible chance of getting into the first page of the Google results for the long tailed keyword that I am targeting, hopefully I’ll get the article into the first position where it will remain for some time, and therefore drive a lot of that traffic to my website.
Exactly the same principle here applies to your website keywords too and better still if your domain name is made up exactly of these keywords, using this same criteria and/or metrics. On that note, it’s perfectly fine to use hyphens, dashes in a domain name, just make sure that you are not violating any company trademark in using a keyword domain. At most you want to be using 2 hyphens in a domain and no more than this. Your website will then stand a very good chance of getting into Google One (first position) using said domain (keyword/s) name.
Backtracking a bit, let’s scroll down on through the list, to see if we can find a more worthwhile possibility, that can actually work to our advantage.
Ok, so I’ve just found one, which is, “Learn To Scuba Dive”. 1,300 searches on Google.com per month, not including the other major search engines such as Yahoo, Ask & MSN, so this figure is likely quite a bit higher per month.
The keyword competition, that is, the number of other sites competing to use “Learn To Scuba Dive” is in this case 119,000 - not perfect, but for our needs, more than perfectly acceptable.
This is the keyword that I want to target with my article at EzineArticles.com first.
So, I log in there and on the left I click on Submit Article. Of course I choose a corresponding category to place this article within.
Now comes the title of my article.
I want to include the keyword in my article title, I want to keep it short, attention grabbing and give my potential readers an inkling of what the article is going to be about.
I’d likely go with something like: