Tuesday 25 March 2008

5 easy ways for getting even more powerful keywords

Fantastic sources of keywords are available virtually to everyone - you only need to know where to find them.

When I am looking for new ideas for articles or when I'm trying to optimize some of my content for specific keywords, I very often rely on my own keyword bookmarklet that many of my readers seem to like as well.

The trick is really to find a good starting point for this bookmarklet. Today, I am going to share with you 5 of my best and proven methods (sources) for working with this tool.

1) My own articles

If I notice that some articles are generating a lot of traffic from search engines, I almost always try to find more keywords related to the content of that articles. This way, I can either update the article a bit to include some more keywords and generate even more traffic, or I can write completely new articles, closely themed to the original one.

2) Top blogs from my niche

When I have a good list of top blogs from my niche (something like this list of 25 top SEO blogs), I will simply open all of these blogs in separate tabs in Firefox, and then launch my bookmarklet on each of them, one by one. I will collect all keywords into one big file for further processing. Actually, this method works incredibly well and allows me to collect huge numbers of very interesting keywords - it's especially useful when I'm rather new to a given niche.

3) Top articles from top blogs

You can think about this source as a refinement of source no. 2. Many blogs list their top posts to win new readers' loyalty. I will open these posts in new tabs and generate keywords from them. It may become rather time consuming when done for larger number of blogs, but may be extremely beneficial.

4) Del.icio.us

When I'm looking for high quality content (blog or not) to be used as a source for my bookmarklet, I often head straight to del.icio.us. I search for my keyword and then use the resulting pages as a source.

5) E-commerce sites

When I am looking for product-oriented keywords, there's no better place then e-commerce sites. But keep in mind - Amazon and the likes are not your best bet. Even though they have enormous product listings, the boomarklet may bring to many irrelevant results. I definitely prefer more niche e-commerce sites, focused on a single product category. This allows me to find many laser-targeted keywords, including brand names and specific models.

If you have any further ideas for sources, please leave them in your comments! I will add them to the mindmap you can see below, so you'll get instant overview of the new ideas