I thought I would get a few variations of searches, but I had no idea what kind of ideas would pop into my head after asking this simple question today.

I wanted to share a very important lesson taught by students of mine (ironically enough) today, during a webinar presentation on Social Media Marketing that I was giving. Most people that I run into have no clue how to properly research out keywords, and they just want me to do it for them. If that is the case with you, then this post is not for you (email me and we can set something up ..lol). I want to give this advice to the people who want to try to figure out things like … oh … basic Internet marketing, and keyword research for themselves!

There is a reason the title of this post is what it is (no it’s not ALL for link bait). If you ask someone how they would do a search online for a “keyword”, have you ever wondered how many differed results you will get? I wondered, and so I did this little experiment. Out of all who were in attendance of this webinar/presentation I was doing, one of them had products and information for those who suffer from headaches on their website. A simple question to the class got me thinking about this post. “How would you do a Google search for information on headaches?” In other words…if you were looking for information right now on Google for headaches, how would you search it out? Out of the 15 people that were online here is what they came back with: (I left spelling errors)

relieve headache pain
headache relief
migranes
www.headache cures.com (my favorite - don’t ya just LOVE when people “Google” the URL?)
How to end my headaches
Migraine, Headache, Pain relief
get rid headaches
sinus pain
headach remedy
headaches
headache
headache medicine
Natural ways to relief headaches
headaches nomore
I’m done with headaches

To me the results are pretty interesting because often times we get to caught up into finding the perfect “keyword” and we miss out on many gems. I am also amazed that not one person did the Google search the same way. I am further amazed that people are still Googling URLs .. WTF is that about? Again it just further testifies that you need to be diverse in the keywords you chose to go after, and think about all options and all ways that people could find you.

This is a great example of how you would take one of your main keywords, in this case - headaches, and have 15 different versions of the same keyword, or anchor text for it when you are link building. The lesson here? Not everyone searches the same way, yet many people doing online marketing get way to caught up in just going after the big (slam dunk) words. If you were able to get decent rankings for each specific way people were searching for headaches in this example, I am guessing it would bring some pretty decent traffic to your website.

Next time you are thinking about some keywords that you would like to be ranked for, make sure and take the time to do a quick poll of family members, friends, neighbors or people you know on sites like Twitter, or Plurk. These can be great resources for researching out almost anything!

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