Help finding some decent keywords

[mr_w]

Anyone care to help a SEO Newbie find a couple of key words that would be easier to rank for for my website that provides kayak fishing information?

mysite: yakangler.com

The key words that I've identified are as follows:

best kayak   
fishing from a kayak
fishing kayak review
fishing kayaks   
kayak and fishing
kayak fishing   
kayak for fishing   
kayak reviews   
kayak rigging
kayak weight limit   
kayaks fishing   
kayaks for fishing

But I'm worried I'm missing the point, I don't see hardly any traffic from most of these. I've really tried to rank for "kayak fishing" but seem to be totally lost in the Google Panda abyss. Any advice on a different word or strategy would be greatly appreciated!

[anthonydnelson]

My simple advice: Create the best page you possibly can around a few of those topics. Make the page compelling and informative and then see what it ranks for. If you are focused on the basic topic (kayak fishing) the keywords will find their way in naturally.

After a bit, you may notice one of the pages ranks well for 'kayak weight limit' and decide to make that a more prominent headline and include the exact phrase when editing.

Some content ideas:

• Essential Gear for Successful Kayak Fishing
• Top 5 Kayaks for Fishing
• 8 Tips for The Beginner Kayak Fisherman
• Rigging Your Kayak for a Day of Fishing

Make these pages be awesome. Put some nice pictures in there. Don't make them just because you want to include keywords. Awesome pages will earn shares and links. Helping you eventually rank for more competitive terms such as 'kayak fishing.' In the meantime, you will get quality long-tail traffic that you didn't even try to target.

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Not sure if you are missing the point but I think its worth revisiting the basics related to keyword research and what is important to understand.

First, when you talk about the Google Panda "abyss", I dont think that is the issue. The issue is kayak fishing is a highly competitive keyword ranked at 52% (using the keyword difficulty tool on seomoz). So you are competing with alot of other people to rank with that keyword. When I am building a basic keyword strategy for a company that is trying to generate some momentum, with a limited budget, then the first thing I do is focus on battles that we can win. Battles you can win are typically related to lower traffic and lower competitive keywords. Once you identify thos keywords you can rank them based on the value of traffic coming from those keyword searches and the competitive ranking (lowest is better than highest), then you start to build solid content around those keywords that will increase your keyword relevance and ranking.

I would guess that you would be analyzing 500-1000 keywords to come up with your master list. A couple of tools you might use are googles keyword tool...but instead of just entering a few of your primary words, take a different approach and find some sites that you think are doing a great job of seo for kayak and kayak fishing and enter their url in the keyword tool and see what types of keywords come up. Pull all of these words out into excel and rank them by level of competitiveness (lowest to highest ) and then go through and lookmat the corresponding search volume. Byu focusing on 20 keywords that have 50-100 monthly search volume, but are low competitive , where you can be ranked top 3 in all of them, will be easier than going after kayak fishing with 8,100 exact match traffic and a highly competitive 52% difficulty.

Finally, I would tell you to make sure you measure everyhting. "What you cant measure you cant manage."  SEOMOZ is a perfect tool to track weekly activity on your keyword rankings. As you publish new content, focus on one keyword and see what type of effect a couple of posts, blogs or articles have on your ranking.

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Mark