Almost all SEO begins with keyword research. Understanding what people are searching for and how many people are searching helps form a solid content strategy.
Beyond the basics, keyword research encompasses many more advanced considerations, including SERP features, keyword search intent, competitive analysis, and even internationalization.
Read the latest Moz posts on keyword research. We’ve also included links to our most popular keyword research resources to help your SEO journey.
Keyword Research : Everything you need to get started with keyword research.
Keyword Research Learning Center : Our free keyword research learning hub. Here, we’ve gathered our top resources in one place.
What is search intent and why does it matter? : Learn more about the power of search intent and how to use it in your keyword research strategy.
Keyword Explorer : Want to dive in? Try our top-rated keyword research tool, with over 500 million keyword suggestions.
When it comes to the search engines and country-specific content or searches, there are several obvious variables the engines use to determine the geography of a particular site or company: TLD (.com or .co.uk or .ca for example) Hosting (Is the site hosted in the UK, the US, Canada?) Inbound links (Are they primarily from US sites, UK ...
In the long tail of keyword searches, the great value comes from having hundreds or thousands of unique, valuable content pages written on a niche subject. The millions of completely unique search terms that hit the engines each day help to bring in traffic that a purely "designed" strategy could never receive. What's fascinating about the long tail targeting process is that i...
Mike Schinkel has an older, but golden post on the beauty of URLs. There's nothing revolutionary here, but since I've been seeing so many ugly URLs in the SERPs lately (have hyphens and subdomains made a comeback with BigDaddy or is it just me?), I have to step in. A few of his rules include: Well De...
At Michael's insistence, I'm going to try to put together a large list of terms and definitions relevant to SEO, web development and the Internet in general. The formats will look like (as ...
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Lots of questions popping up lately about how to rank well on Google.co.uk vs. Google.com. Danny shared this nugget of gold at SEW today: google uk is going to favor uk based sites by default, even if you don't use the pages from the uk option. you want to do well ...
In my opinion, temporal based data is one of the most valuable kinds of information that feeds into a modern search engine's algorithm. With it, search engines know when terms are getting more popular, when new terms are being used by searchers a...
I am always running the logs on my websites seeing where the traffic is coming from. One of my websites has a blog and I post to that blog almost every day. My initial set-up for that blog had seven posts on the homepage and the archiving was done weekly. After I had been ...
If you like watching what the world is searching for, search spies (programs that output the searches that are being performed on the site in real time) are a fun resource. Over at SEOChat, Mick's asked the question and Jammer & Skipsel have provided very nice lists. There's quite a few: ...
Rod Coleman emailed me last night about his new rank checking and monitoring tool. It's free to sign up for 10 terms or $5/month for up to 75 terms. It checks the following engines: Alltheweb Altavista AOL...
Today has me thinking on the subject of measuring keyword performance. I'm about to begin a relatively large scale campaign on both the organic and PPC side for a client and have wrestled with the neccessary facts and figures to track in order to have reasonable metrics. Here's a sh...
In reference to a thread at SEOChat on the anatomy of a good keyword by Robert Paulson, I have deleted the specific terms out of one of my own keyword spreadsheets and am offering it for download. You're welcome to re-use this a...
A report from emarketer today - Search Query Keyword Insight - details the results of some research over the pas...
Rarely do I give a colleague praise so publicly, yet Dan Thies deserves it. His efforts are unmatched in the area of keyword research and targeting, an often under-appreciated specialty in the SEO business. Recently, Dan has started a ...
For many designers & graphic artists, a first experience with disambiguation will be during an image search at a site like Getty One or Corbis. We'll conduct a search for "marine" and a pag...