Imagination is more important than knowledge. -Albert Einstein

I’m taking a break today from writing articles about poker social media optimization, and I’m going to write about poker keyword research (and  flabberschmidt)  instead. I’ve contended for a long time that the best tool for doing poker keyword research is your brain. For example, let’s suppose you want to create a website about a particular poker niche, let’s say “Texas holdem strategy”. If I went to a site about Texas holdem strategy, I would expect to see sections about the following topics:

1. How to Play Texas Holdem
2. Basics or Fundamentals of Texas Holdem Strategy
3. How the Blinds Affect Texas Holdem Strategy Choices
4. How Position Affects Texas Holdem Strategy Choices
5. Texas Holdem Ring Game Strategy
6. Texas Holdem SitnGo Strategy
7. Texas Holdem Tournament Strategy
8. Short-Handed Texas Holdem Strategy
9. Limit Holdem Strategy
10. No Limit Holdem Strategy

I’d probably come up with maybe 10 more broad categories, then write a page about each one, and then come up with 20 or so subtopics of each category to put inside the top-level categories, and wind up with a 400 or so page website. (Some of the top level categories would contain fewer subcategories, like “How to Play Texas Holdem”, and some would contain more subcategories, like “No Limit Holdem Strategy”.)

One post at PAL today contends that you should use a keyword tool because no one’s imagination is so good that he’d think of every possible term that gets searched for. I contend that it’s impossible to cover every term anyway, but you’ll be more likely to find low-competition phrases (like flabberschmidt) using your head than you will using a tool. In fact, if you use the Google Adwords Keyword tool, your top level categories will probably be pretty similar to the top-level categories that everyone else is using for their site, and possibly even in the same order. When I type in “Texas holdem strategy” in the Google Keyword Tool, I get these as the top phrases:

1. Texas Holdem Strategy
2. Texas Holdem Poker Strategy
3. Texas Holdem Strategies
4. Limit Texas Holdem Strategy
5. Texas Holdem Tournament Strategy
6. No Limit Texas Holdem Strategy
7. Texas Holdem Online Strategy
8. Texas Holdem Strategy Guide
9. Texas Holdem Poker Tournament Strategy
10. Advanced Texas Holdem Strategy

Now, admittedly, I’ve gotten some ideas from using this tool. But I think the content outline I came up with using my head is more useful and contains more low competition phrases than the list I got using the Google Keyword Tool.

My point being that tools are great, but using your head first, and then using tools the way they were meant to be used (as an aid to your brain) is a better strategy. For example, “fundamentals of Texas holdem strategy” has minimal competition as a keyword phrase. You should be able to rank for that phrase easily. But “advanced Texas holdem strategy” is pretty noncompetitive too. But not nearly as noncompetitve as “fundamentals…” Try a Google “allintitle” search and check out the competition for yourself.

While you’re at it, take a look at the “allintitle” results for “Texas holdem ring game strategy” too.

But the end result of my imaginative approach to poker keyword research is that I’ll have a different Texas holdem strategy site from yours. But how much do you want to bet that two people using the same keyword research tool are going to create very similar sites with very similar structures?

And which site is going to attract more links? The site with the unique, imaginative perspective? Or the site with the many similar sites going to attract more links?

Which site is more likely to get bookmarked?

I’ll get back to writing more about social media optimization in the poker niche tomorrow. I’ll probably write about question and answer sites specifically.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Poker Keyword Research . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.