Kudos to Noble Samurai, the inventors of Market Samurai (a very good SEO/keyword research tool) – The Four Golden Rules to Determine Keywords are:

• Relevance
• Traffic
• Competition
• Commerciality

Besides knowing these basic rules, it pays to be quite well-versed in the subject you want to rank for. Even with all the wonderful tools, there’s no substitute for thinking about what kind of target market is best for you… and who (you’ve found) is willing to pay.

Because Market Samurai tools are designed for online commerce, they display Adwords CPC figures, $ SEO value, and the OCI rating – a measure of how commercial the keyword phrase is. The cost of the Adwords CPC can also indicate a highly sought after keyword.

Chosen Keyword Phrase Glitches

Ranking a top keyword phrase can have its problems.  Take for example, ‘Salesforce.com Developers’ – well, all the top spots are taken by Job adverts. At least there is enough Australian searches for Salesforce.com Consultants, and thus my client was able to hit number three spot after only on-page analysis and optimisation was done (even with constraints).

A little more social media and link building, and determination of who owns top spot, and an ongoing top three spot for SalesForce Consultant would be probable.

I know many of your websites are not all long-lived Aunties, with a reputation over many years, but we can make great progress with the aid of some keyword tools and commonsense. After all, we haven’t yet made the time machine (to go back to 1996 to buy domains).

How do you like the new look website, folks? It’s all now on WordPress, but old blog posts are all still available for viewing.