A good keyword has to be:

1. Laser-targeted to your chosen niche

2. Highly relevant to the page that you are optimizing

3. Something that lots of people are searching for

4. A term that has very, very low SEO competition

If you can get all of these right, you’ll succeed in the search engines. Another way to put this is that if your keyword doesn’t seem so good for any one of these points, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful.

I’m making a bold assumption here of course (it’s Friday after all). I’m guessing you don’t have a major website with a huge presence like Apple or Google and that you don’t have 10,000 backlinks and a PageRank of 7. Am I right? If you are one of these sites then well done! You can probably let go on a few of the points listed above.

If you’re one of us little guys then read on.

My Four Points listed above might sound a little bit harsh. Why shouldn’t you be able to compete on a nice, simple keyword like iPhone or Gordon Ramsay or 24? A direct answer would be “OK. Have a go then”. I’ll see you in 6 months after you’ve spent all your time collecting links, tweaking pages and checking your Google position.

The point is, you can’t win on these highly popular keywords. There’s too much competition out there. Too many other websites and too many relevant backlinks to these sites. You’ll blow your entire marketing budget and still not get the search traffic that you deserve.

The better approach is to find a niche that you can dominate and build from there. Follow the keyword rules above and you’ll get site that appears high in the search rankings for relevant, good volume keywords. This will help to grab the visitors.

Next time we’ll go into some more detail on why the four points are important, what happens if you don’t follow them and some handy tips to check how you’re doing on each point.