How Difficult Are Your Keywords?

Good websites and blogs target a main set of keywords. With most of my sites, I will target 3-5 keywords with my homepage. This site is about ‘make money online’, ‘make money online free’, ‘earn money online’, ‘internet marketing’, ‘make money blogging’, and some other subjects, so I naturally target all of those keywords.
Choosing Keywords

When you choose the keywords you want your site to be about, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. Do you know how hard it’s going to be to get ranked for your site’s keywords? Some keywords are extremely difficult. I’ve chosen a few of those, but at least I knew what I was getting myself into. If you’re just starting out, I would recommend choosing some easier ones. You can move toward more difficult ones after you get some experience.

Let’s have a look at the keywords I’ve chosen so that we can get an idea of how difficult they are. In order to get an idea of how difficult each of the keywords are, I’m going to use the keyword difficulty tool at SEOChat.com. It shows difficulty by percentage - the higher the percentage, the more difficult the keyword is to target.

* ‘make money online’ - 81.85%
* ‘make money online free’ - 83.7%
* ‘internet marketing’ - 84.58%
* ‘make money blogging’ - 80.96%
* ‘earn money online’ - 66.17%

The top four keywords are going to be nearly impossible for most beginners, but the bottom one would be attainable. Even if you know what you’re doing, plan on working for about a year to get ranked on the first page of Google for the top four. Even though ‘earn money online’ doesn’t get searched for as much as some of the others, it brings me the most traffic - because it’s an easier keyword.

Now let’s take a look at some of the long-tail keywords I regularly get traffic from:

* how to find out if supplemental google - 49%
* insert google adsense on my blog - 45.64%
* how to float my adsense unit - 5.48%

These keywords are obviously quite a bit easier to target, and you can see why I go after long-tail keywords for my Saturday case study, HowToMobile.com.
Keyword Difficulty Rules

* If you’re a new blogger or webmaster, go after keywords that have less than 70% difficulty.
* If you go after keywords that have more than 80% difficulty, plan on working for about a year before you get to the first page in Google.
* For instant traffic, target keywords that have less than 50% difficulty.

How difficult are your keywords? I would love to know how difficult the words are that everyone is going after. Who is going after the hardest keyword? Does anyone target one that’s harder than ‘internet marketing’? Who targets the easiest one?