When starting a niche site, the first step is usually keyword research and then a large majority of the time is spent on content creation and the process seems simple enough - pick profitable keywords to target then write content that targets those keywords but hold on just a moment… there’s more to think about.
Where Are Keywords Used?
Most people don’t really stop to think about where they will use their keywords. They simply identify keywords that they want to rank for and then pimp out their site SEO-wise to try and target that keyword as effectively as possible. But stopping to think about where you use your keywords will reveal the kinds of content you need to create, and where you don’t need content at all.
Your Website Content
This is the most obvious place where you will use your keywords - on your site itself. You’ll create a blog post, article page or something similar that is targeted towards your chosen keyword. You’ll do as much on-page SEO as you can to make your posts & pages rank as well as possible for your chosen keywords. In order for your website to rank for a particular keyword, you need to create content that targets it.
Actually, that last statement is not quite true. Go to Google and type in “twitter tactics”. Depending on where in the world you are, the site http://www.twittertactics.com/ ranks very highly for this keyword and yet it is a completely empty WordPress default blog that was created and then abandoned. The only place where the keyword has been used is in the URL and the title of the site. There isn’t even a post that targets it. However, this keyword is probably not a competitive one so this doesn’t often happen!
Article (Marketing) Content
The next new posts in this project will discuss the backlink strategies that I am using for my niche sites and article marketing is one of them. Now there are two ways in which you can benefit from an article:
* The backlink you place in the article or resource box
* Traffic that comes from the article itself
To utilise the first strategy, you just need to write pretty much any old article that is related to your site and then insert a link back to your site in the resource box. There is nothing to say that you have to target any particular keywords in the article itself because the important part is the backlink for which you will use appropriate anchor text (see below).
However this is only one way to benefit from articles and is really a bit of a wasted potential if that is all you do. Josh Spaulding in his Article Marketing Domination book advocates writing an article that is going to draw in traffic to the article itself and a portion of those people will click through to your link so this way not only do you benefit from the backlink, but from the traffic itself.
There are two ways in which you can approach the process of writing a highly-trafficked article. One way is to once again abandon all keywords and simply write the most compelling article headline you can think of and hope that its listing in the directory will be enough. However if you are in a competitive niche it can be tricky to really stand out from the crowd amongst hundreds of other articles. The other strategy is to utilise the ranking power of the directory and target low competition phrases in the article itself.
When doing your competition research I am sure that you will have seen on many occasions an article from EZine Articles ranking in the top 10 in the serps. Google loves EA, probably a lot more than your site and if you wrote that same article for your website, your EA article would probably out-rank your site article. By utilising the power of popular directories you can target keywords that the directory can rank for and then drive traffic that way.
Web 2.0 Hosted Content
Similarly to the above, there are now a whole bunch of web 2.0 sites where you can host content - but much richer content than is usually allowed in article directories. I’m talking about sites like Squidoo, Hubpages and Weebly to name three of them. Once again, you have two strategies open to you - Just put up a page that is related to your niche and throw in your chosen link or try to create a page that is going to rank for keywords and drive traffic through your link.
For these strategies the keywords that you target for these third party sites does not necessarily have to be the same ones you are trying to rank for on your main site.
Anchor Text
Any time you place a link anywhere, the text that is underlined is called the anchor text. Now in many places you can directly control and create your links specifically. For example in your own blog posts, article submissions, hosted pages on web 2.0 sites and so on. If you leave comments on blogs as a backlink method the name that you leave the comment under counts as the anchor text. Note - I don’t like this method and people who use keywords in the name on my blog have to work that much harder to ensure their comment doesn’t get deleted 
There are some links where you don’t specifically control the anchor text. For example, a great way to build lots of links every time you create content is to socially bookmark your posts but each bookmarking site will use its only link creation method. Often the anchor text will be the title that you submit so you have some degree of control but not as much as you do on your own content.
Backlinks are more important than on-page SEO and some people say that the anchor text is one of the most important factors in ranking. It’s much better to rank for a keyword than for your own name for instance. Once again, the anchor text that you choose does not have to be used in the url that you are linking to. Obviously if the anchor text is deemed relevant to the content of the url being linked to then it will be worth more in the eyes of Google but you do not have to target just one keyword for example. You can (and should) vary your anchor text.
Tags
Tags, tags, tags! Tags are everywhere. You can tag your blog posts, tag your boomarks, tag your web 2.0 pages, tag your bum, tag your photos… Wait, one of those might not be quite right but you get the idea! Not much is known about the strength of tagging as far as ranking goes but it certainly doesn’t hurt and like with anchor text, no content is needed for a tag - you just type in whatever tag you feel like.
Now depending on where the tag is, broad tags or more specific tags may work better. For example if you are tagging content in StumbleUpon, broad tags work better as they are used to determine what your page is about and broad tags drive more traffic than specific ones because people tend to search for broad topics.
However if you are tagging something like a Squidoo page, those tags help users find similarly tagged pages and using specific keywords is encouraged.
Keyword Content & Generic Content
Recently I discussed the subject of writing for difficult keywords. What do you do if you want to target a keyword such as “mobile phone buy”? Well you can use the punctuation trick that I mentioned in the article but what you can also do is to use that keyword in places where content is not needed - such as anchor text and tags. Tags work specially well here. You can write a generic article about buying mobile phones and tag it with those specific awkward keywords that are difficult to write for.
When I talked about content research I suggested that you should try to write as uniquely as possible on your site so that you can pick up as much long tail traffic as possible. That is true if you are writing content for your own website but what about that external content that you create for article directories and web 2.0 sites? Those sites are great places to put your generic content that doesn’t really target keywords very well.
For example, in one of the niches that I have looked at, there is a lot of information out there, lots of EZine Articles, lots of PLR packs available but most of the content is very generic in terms of keywords. The content itself is good, gives solid advice to the reader but simply doesn’t target any profitable keywords. Is this content useless? For your site maybe but not for external sites. Write those generic articles for directories and web 2.0 sites and then use carefully crafted links with your chosen anchor text and tag the content with the keywords that you want to target.
Keywords With Low Traffic
When deciding upon niches, we’re looking for keywords that have good levels of traffic and low enough competition that we can rank for it. But if you have spent any length of time with a keyword research tool I’m sure you’ll find a whole bunch of keywords that have very low traffic levels. What should you do with these? Well because the traffic potential is so low it probably is not worth going to the effort of writing lots of specific content for those keywords, and you certainly wouldn’t want to build a whole site around them like with the keyword sniping strategy!
However bear in mind that the vast majority of traffic is from single-searched terms, having all of those weird and wonderful long tail terms on your site can help you pick up significant amounts of traffic over time. Use those keywords in places where you don’t have to go to much effort - use them in anchor text, in tags, in category headings etc.
Conclusion
All keywords have a use but just because you want to target a keyword does not necessarily mean that you have to write content for it. Use the power of third party sites like Ezine Articles to help you rank for terms that your site might not be able to rank for. Use tags wherever you can and use them to target all those long tail phrases with low traffic. Carefully control your anchor text where applicable, and when writing content on third party sites in particular, think carefully about the purpose of the article - for a backlink? To get headline traffic? To rank in the serps? All of those?
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