My Thoughts on Keyword Research and Global Search Count

In my previous post on the Importance of Keyword Research I said this:

"Hypertension is too short to use as I will never rank well for the one word, high blood pressure is longer but it too is difficult to rank for but arterial hypertension is much easier to rank for; it still gets lots of searches per month and it has the highest CPC rate of them all.  I quantify it with a couple extra (secondary keywords) and this should be a good earner." 

To that I received the following question from an eHow friend:

What search numbers do you look for in choosing your keywords? And do you use the local or global column numbers [in Google Adwords Keyword Tools]?  For example, would you consider 100,000 global searches too competitive, and shoot for 1,000? 100? I have read to look for around 100, but that seems awfully low to me.


Another question: [A friend] mentioned to me that she adds her keyword phrase at the bottom of her article to help ensure it gets crawled all the way through by the search engine bots. Do you do this?

My answer:

I look at the global search volume only... unless I write a location specific article.  I've only written one of those however: How To Get A Real Estate License in Missouri (article removed by ehow).  Lately I've been shooting for a range of 2,000-20,000 for my first phrase and 1,000-10,000 for my second or third phrases.  All CPC rates I shoot for are higher than $1.00 with my first phrase being the highest usually.


I know this sounds like a lot of moving parts but it's not tough.  It takes about 5 minutes of research - tops.  The article I just wrote on arterial hypertension (article removed by ehow) was centered on three phrases:

• "Arterial Hypertension" with 14,800 searches at a rate of $7.34, 
• "Better Nutrition" with 6,600 searches at a rate of $2.70, 
• and "Lifestyle Choices" with 5,400 searches at $1.08.  

This gives me a good mix of phrases to repeat periodically throughout the article which should all should make money and make the article flow a bit better.  I shoot for 1-2 of any of these phrases per paragraph though I don't have any firm rules on this.  Oh, and I don't count words.  I also make sure the main phrase is in the opening paragraph... maybe twice if it is long, and I virtually duplicate my title (minus the "How To") as the caption of my picture and for the file name of my picture.

This seems to be working so far as my as my 6 weeks at eHow has given me good earnings at just shy of $10 per thousand page views (this was consistent in both August & September).  That's three times the eCPM rate of my longevity blog.  I figure in 2 months when my eHow articles mature their rate of earnings will probably be a little above $10 per thousand page views.