See basic keyword research for targeted marketing if you are unfamiliar with the basics of keyword research then come back here.

For each category you decided upon, you should take the time to research the words or phrases that you will use for category showcase names and post categories on your site as well as the words and phrases that you want your site to rank for on search engines.

A good category keyword has a mesh of the following things going for it:

• A good search volume to competition ratio
  The higher the volume and the lower the number of competing sites, the better…as long as the rest are true as well.
• Used with reasonable popularity by buyers
  While you cannot always tell this, if you see a large number of searches for "buy" or "store" and your keyword, you can be sure that buyers use that term.
• No 800 pound gorillas in the top search spots
  Those gorillas aren’t typically as tough as they would have you believe, but if you can find terms with low pagerank sites having few backlinks coming in as the top results you will have an easier time of taking the top spot in search results.

For each category, try to come up with at least three to four good search terms and use the one which appears to have the most promise ( the best mix of the above ) as your primary keyword for that category. The rest will be secondary keywords for it.

When you finish you should keep your list somewhere safe as you will continue to use it while building your site and when you start actively marketing it.

How most people choose their domain name poorly

A lot of people go with the name of their store, which doesn’t work so well unless your store has excellent name recognition or a name which contains the keywords that people are looking for.

By way of example, if you sell antique books and your store name is Brins Treasures, unless you have the name recognition of coca cola, walmart, etc., having your primary domain named www.brinstreasures.com is not the best way to go.

A better way to choose your domain name

Instead, your main domain name should have something to do with the words that people actually search on. Rather than guessing and choosing something like www.brinsantiquebooks.com, you should spend the little bit of extra time, effort, and energy required to make sure you pick the strongest domain name possible.

If you have not done so, and are unfamiliar with keyword research in general, be sure to read "Basic Keyword Research for Targeted marketing before continuing.

For this example, you might go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter “antique book” as your initial phrase, which would give you results on searches related to antique books as well as additional keywords to consider, among which you would find “used books”, “collectible books”, “old books”, and “rare books”.

Adding those phrases to your search and re-running it, you would get something akin to the following:

Looking over the global monthly search volume, we find that used books, collectible books, old books, rare books, and antiquarian collectible books all have more people searching for them than antique books…so better choices for a domain name might be

• brinsusedbooks.com
• brinscollectiblebooks.com
• brinsoldbooks.com
• brinsrarebooks.com
• brinsantiquariancollectiblebooks.com

Checking the competition

Of course, before making a final decision on your domain name, you should also take a look at your competition

To do so, pop each keyword into google and search on it. Make sure to enclose each phrase in quotes so that only potentially relevant pages show up.

Used books shows some pretty stiff competition with 38.8 million results and having abebooks, alibris, barnsandnoble, and half show up in the top four spots…in addition to three paid ads above the results.

Collectible books is a bit more accessable, with only 4.2 million results and no paid advertisements…but it still has powells, abebooks, cdickens, and biblio in the top four spots.

Old books looks even better, with 3.5 million results, one paid advertisement at the top of the results and rbms and alibris being the top competition.

Rare books also has some stiff competition, with 10 million results, no paid advertisements on top of the search results, and abebooks, alibris, and amazon coming in as your top competitors.

Personally, I would try to go with a smaller niche if I wanted to compete in such markets, but if I had to use a broad selection I would choose collectiblebooks or oldbooks as part of my domain name. Both get good search volume and the natural search results competition is not nearly as tough as it is for either used books or rare books.

Branding Considerations

If you really want your store name as a domain, register one domain as shown above via keyword research and a second domain with your store name.

Then, use the keyword domain for setting up your site and park your branding domain on top of it. For this example, perhaps you pick two domain names:

• BrinsTreasures.com
• BrinsCollectibleBooks.com

Setup your site on BrinsCollectibleBooks.com and then park BrinsTreasures.com on top of it so that both domain names point to the same site.

For search ranking purposes, you would then focus on your researched domain name, trying to get links to your site named "Collectible Books" or "Brins Collectible Books".

While getting people to your site is nice, your focus should be on bringing people who are looking to buy the types of items you offer to your website.

There are literally thousands of articles available on different aspects of keyword research and everyone seems to have their own favorite methods…some completely free and some involving expensive monthly subscriptions. This article will cover the basics of doing your own keyword research with simple, freely available tools.

Basic Words for Researching

When starting your keyword research, you first need to know what you are wanting to do and decide upon a few initial keywords to look into.

For example, if you have a store specializing in childrens toys, you might start out using just the word toys. Alternatively, you might start with more specific terms such as “kids toys” and “childrens toys”.

Finding high search volume terms

Once you have a couple of words to look into, you need to find out what people are searching for in relation to those words.

To start with, I recommend using the Google External Keyword Tool.

The Google External Keyword Tool

To start:

• Enter your initial search terms, one per line, into the "Enter one keyword or phrase per line:" box
• Leave the "Use synonyms" box checked
• Enter the displayed characters into the box below them.
• Leave "Filter my results" alone for now
• Select "Get keyword ideas"

You should then see results listed below the entry box similar to those below:

As you can see, you get a variety of results back showing the number of searches done locally for the current month as well as the global monthly search volume for each word or phrase listed on the left.

At the top, click “Global Monthly Search Volume” to order the results by volume.

The words and phrases listed at the top are those which most people search for. As you can see, for these phrases most people search for “kids toys”, though there are plenty of people searching for a variety of other words as well.

Depending on the type of keyword research you are doing, you may or may not be worried about competition for particular terms. Fortunately, a quick easy way to determine competition is to take any particular term and put it into a search engine in quotes.

There are a few things of note in the above image:

• In the red box, you see three sites paying to have their listings above all of the normal search results. That denotes that there is some serious paid competition out there for the term Kids toys
• In the purple box, you will see that there are 3.8 million sites competing on the phrase “kids toys” for search engine ranking. Normally you will want that number to be as low as possible…and 3.8 million results denotes that your keyword is probably too generic to compete effectively.
• In the yellow box, you will see sites that are paying to have advertisements displayed for the term “kids toys”. These you don’t need to worry about unless you plan to do paid advertising yourself.
• In the green box is your primary competition. Specifically, the results on the first page are your primary competition. Ideally, you will want to end up as the first result if at all possible.

Checking the competition

Once you have limited your term down to something with a smaller result of competing sites ( the purple box ), you should then visit at least the first three sites being displayed and see what google thinks of them in terms of page rank ( 0 being the lowest, 10 being the highest ).

For this, I recommend using mozilla firefox and getting the google toolbar plugin for it as the plugin can be set to display page rank of any site you visit and quickly let you see how many backlinks a site has as well as what they are.

As you can see, if you were to try and compete on “Kids Toys”, your primary competitor would be Toys R Us…and google gives them a page rank of 7…so you would have your work cut out for you.

If you selected “Backward links”, you would find that there are over 1000 links to Toys R Us from various sites. While you cannot tell if they are quality links or not, a thousand links can be a bit hard to overcome.

If you selected “Similar Pages”, you would find sites which google considers similar to the Toys R Us site, of which it lists 28.

Personally, I would fine tune my search phrase to try and have weaker competition in terms of search ranking. Perhaps you are selling educational toys…doing a search for that term (in quotes) returns only 21,600 competing sites, one paid advertiser at the top of the results, and the highest ranked site has a page rank of 2 and only two backward links. Of course, that phrase only has 6,600 monthly search results…but taking the number one spot (which typically gets over 50% of all clicks by users) would be trivial.

Google Trends From Wordtracker

Another handy tool for keyword research is google trends from Wordtracker. While the results aren’t terribly up to date on their free tool, you can find a variety of different phrases…and by selecting the three bars in the "G" column, you can see how much competition there is on a particular term as well as the number of visitors per day for that term.

This information can give you a rough idea of how tough the competition is, though I prefer using the google toolbar as above.

Google Insights for Search

Another nice tool, especially when you have a few different keywords you want to compare, is Google Insights for Search.

Just place your terms in the "Search terms" box at the top, specify the region and dates you are interested in, and select search.

As you can see, you will get regional interest, a list of search terms ( related to the specified phrase…change this with the dropdown ), and a list of searches that are increasing in volume.

Here you will see that “toys for kids” looks to have the highest number of results for “kids toys”, but a ton of people search for store names in relation to kids toys. When you see that kind of brand recognition, it is typically best to find a different search phrase.

Final words…

While volumes of information exists on keyword research, for increasing traffic to your website without paid advertising, the most important things to consider when doing keyword research are the demand for your possible keyword and the quality of the sites which come up in the top few results. You can certainly choose to go up against stiff competition, but you will get results a lot faster if you start out by focusing on getting your site to show as the top result for less competitive terms.