Glad to hear you’re finding the resources here helpful. In regards to your question–yes, what you suggest is a good idea. You may have a group of general keywords for your website and you can write on those topics, but there are also other more specialized keywords that you can target as well depending on the type of article you’re writing.

You may have one main target market (people with kids who want to buy toys), but with that article you mentioned, you can get much more specific (people with kids who want to buy toys that will help children exercise). You could do a few articles on that one topic, all geared with different target markets in mind (those who are interested in toys, those interested in exercise equipment toys, and those who are trying to increase the activity of their children).

If you wanted to take the childhood obesity angle, you could write an article about toys that help prevent obesity in children, and included in the list would be one of your toys.

That’s a great approach and something I encourage because it allows you to get more coverage for your topic. Yes, do the keyword research on exercise equipment. As long as you’re writing an article on that topic, you might as well be using keywords that are popular.

I hope that helps!

I have a question that I have not yet seen on any of the threads on keywords used in titles:

Is it advisable to research words that are not related to one’s website but are the topic of the article?

For instance, if my article is about a toy (my Web-based business) that can double as exercise equipment for couch-potato kids, would I want to know that the words I’m using in reference to how it could be used would be good keywords were my business exercise equipment (such as: child obesity, exercise equipment, overweight teens, etc.)?

It seems to me that I could then double-up my target market. Am I off base here? A lot of my planned articles would be about my products’ usefulness in various contexts.

Thanks for all the great, useable advice.

One of your new students,
Irenne

It is perfectly fine if you’d just like to write articles on particular topic and not do keyword research–you can still see excellent results with Article Marketing.

By far the most important aspect of article marketing is consistency–submitting articles every month for an extended period of time (preferably the lifetime of your website). If all this keyword and SEO stuff is making your brain hurt (and it makes mine hurt sometimes too! ), then please don’t focus on it. Just write articles on the topic of your website, and submit them regularly.

You might find this post reassuring: The #1 Reason Why Article Marketing Fails (and I’ll tell you right now it is not a lack of knowledge of SEO!)

You can do this–as a newbie by just reading that one post I just linked to above, you will have everything you need to make a strong start with Article Marketing.

Best wishes,
Steve

Sounds like a great way to introduce keywords, at the same time providing REAL info that can also be entertaining…

Jerry

Yes, that’s often the case–I would always recommend writing for your target market first and then after that optimizing your language to suit what people are searching for.

The funny thing is that unless we do keyword research and find out for sure what our target market is searching for (the exact types of wording they use), then we can be using language that makes sense to us but doesn’t even pop into the minds of our readers.

So, as a Step 1–write a useful article for your target market, using easy to understand terms and such.

Then, if you wanted to take things up a notch, you could implement a Step 2 where you targeted certain keywords in your articles (writing specifically on those topics) to capitalize on specific search terms that your target market is using.

As you said, though–that Step 1 is a crucial part that you can’t do away with and just following Step 1 will take you a long way.