subject: How To Find What You Want Online With These 4 Keyword Research Methods [print this page] Today we're going to look at the different ways you can search for information online. While there are endless keyword phrases, there are only 4 main methods you would use for online search, which are: Broad match, phrase match, exact match and long tail keywords.
When you type keyword phrases into Google, you'll notice that the search engine will give you other possibilities. Make note of these since they could guide you to even more targeted searches.
First off, we'll look at Broad Match keywords: This keyword combination uses all the words in the search. For example, let's say you search for the keyword: Technical writing. This brings up many millions results, which is huge. This is because the search is for both technical and writing.
When you look at the words at the bottom of the page, you might find a better search. If not, chance are your search is too broad and you'll need to narrow your focus to get better results.
One way of doing this is to use a phrase match search. This is where you add quotation marks around the keyword phrase, like this: "keyword research" This tells the search engine to look for pages that use this phrase. Using quotes in this way help us narrow the search even more. We still get millions of results, though considerably less than before.
The other keyword research method we'll look at is: Exact match. This is where you put brackets around the keyword, like this: [keyword] Using our keyword: [technical writing], we get over 24 million results, which is way too much. Sometimes this method can be unpredictable, as you've seen here.
The last keyword research method we'll look at is where we look for: "Long tail keywords." This is where we add more words to the search phrase. In this case, we'll search for: technical writing jobs telecommuting. We get about 80,000 results, which is much better. Still, we can go even further by adding quotation marks around the keyword phrase. Doing a search this way only gives us a few results. Be aware that this may be going too far. Then again, you might find exactly what you need. Keyword research is an extremely important way of finding what you want online. Here, you've learned about 4 different methods. To go deeper with your searches, experiment with different keyword phrases.
