» How to Use Wordtracker for Your Link Campaign

I’d like to share with you exactly how I use Wordtracker in my link campaigns (and more, but we’ll start there).

Here’s a fast, easy to follow tutorial on what I typically do…

I go to the Keyword Universe tool within the Wordtracker admin. From there, I type in my main keyword. For example, let’s say I built a niche site around dog food. In this example, my main keyword would probably be “dog food”.

Type in dog food and Wordtracker will find about 300 variations on the word. This isn’t every last variation on the phrase dog food, but it’s a great start. What I’ll do next is click on the words or phrases that actually fit my niche site.

Dog food comes up first so click on it. Over in the right-hand side window, under “Popularity Search” about 300 more niche terms related to dog food show up. Terms like “solid gold dog food”, “nutro dog food”, and on and on. All these terms are phrases people actually type into the search engines. Wordtracker will also provide you with a count and prediction for each.

Add every last one of these terms into your keyword basket. From there you can click dig, to really expand on the terms or you can go back to the left side of the Wordtracker admin and go down the list. It just depends on how much time you have.

For help with my link campaigns, I don’t usually use the dig feature. Instead I’ll just go down the list on the left and click on relevant terms, let Wordtracker find me the phrases that match and add them all to my basket.

For a phrase like “dog food”, if I go through all the relevant terms on the left side of the window, I’d imagine I could get 4,000 or more key words. Just collect them all in your basket.

When you’re done, click on the bottom where it says “Click here for step 3″. Wordtracker will assemble a list of all your key terms. At the top, you’ll see 3 navigation icons. The third one is the “Competition Search”. You will be asked to select two search engines. Since I want as much free traffic as I can get, I usually select the Google and Yahoo_eng search engines (you could also add or substitute MSN in there - these are the top 3 search engines).

Then click proceed to allow Wordtracker to perform the KEI analysis. Next you’ll see a list of the top 100 low competition keywords from your dog food list. The term in the #1 spot will be the one with the least amount of competing websites per search count. The #2 spot will be occupied for the second best phrase to use and so on, all the way down to the #100 spot.

The more words you have in your basket, the more likely that even the 100th spot will actually be a key phrase worth targeting (not that you need 100 different key phrases for your link campaign — but you might use these valuable key phrases later on).

Wordtracker will compile data like this for both Google and Yahoo (or whatever search engine you selected in the previous step). Out of these lists, select the search terms as high up on the list as you can go that would make sense for you to use as your website title.

For example. I collected about 800 terms for this sample run (there are many more I could have chosen, but I didn’t want this to take all day). From my trial, the #1 spot is taken up by the phrase “dog rawhide bones chews treats”. It has a very high KEI analysis. You could actually make this into the anchor text for your dog food site quite easily. If you don’t like the way it sounds, then go with #2, “Guaranteed dog treats”, or #3 “Dog treats and cookies”. Even better is “Savory dog food”.

Actually, any of the top 10 terms Wordtracker returned for this niche would be a great choice. So pick a few and then use a tool like Directory Submitter to create a few different profiles for your link campaign. Start getting links to your dog food site from the directories in Directory Submitter. Since these words get traffic and are fairly low in competition, it won’t take too long for you to show up high in the search engines for them.

Use a service link Link Metro to get some reciprocal links with these search terms. Just start with one title and then switch it out for another one a few days later. That way, not all your link partners from Link Metro will use the same anchor text and description for your link.

Write a few articles with different text in the resource box. Submit them and you’ll start getting backlinks with the different anchors from all over the internet.

Doesn’t this make more sense then putting in the anchor text “Dog Food” for every last link you go out and get? Imagine, with a highly competitive term like that you would need hundreds upon hundreds of links to get anywhere. But by choosing the terms that are searched less, you can start getting traffic much quickly. I know I’d rather have a little traffic than none at all.

If you’re interested in a Camtasia video of the exact strategy I use to get these fantastic keywords from Wordtracker, just let me know.

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