When starting a link building campaign and keyword research the basis of good research is to first analyze market defining keywords or MDK’s. In order to get to those SEO keywords that people will search for and that will convert your traffic you need to define your market on the web, and we do that by doing market defining keyword research.
One of the biggest mistakes most bloggers and new webmasters make in their in-house SEO efforts is to rank for market defining keywords. So let’s explain, what is a market defining keyword? It is exactly what you think it is, a word or words that generally describes your market, let’s take a look at an example, if you take travel websites for example what are their market defining keywords?
Travel
Journey
Vacation
Holiday
These are just the top MD keywords that come into mind, if you take a minute to think about it you can create a great list of related MDK’s, and this list can be used to find some amazing SEO converting keywords. But it would be a mistake to try and rank for MD keywords even if Google Adwords Keyword Tool shows you that there is a search volume, those are most likely SEO’s looking and doing their research. LOL
MD keywords are used to define your market and find keywords that you can rank for that will bring you traffic and some conversions. This is a great way to expand with link building and see what other relevant markets you can tap into for a high quality link. When doing a link building campaign you can often get stuck with a small market and it seems like there are no more websites to get links from, with this approach you can indentify plenty of other markets that are closely related to yours and that can be used for link building.
One quick tip for the end, there are two amazing market defining keyword tools you can use, the first one is Thesaurus and the second one is your own creativity.
