To Getwhatchuwant:
Please understand that I have no intention to be spoon fed. But could you please answer this question?
I am sure I'm not the only one, but if you write "what they do", "how they work", "research behind them" articles and none are searching for those every month, what good are those other than perhaps to decrease bounce rate?
I built a gigantic site before in 2008 based on that model. I read forums every day and gave answers through my blog. Each blog post took me 3-4 hours to finish, but the site never exceeded 400 visits per day in its prime. I was hoping for much more than that after working 1.5 years on it. My PR was 6 and I got links from PR 5, 6 and 7 authority sites so I know it worked. Just that those contents were targeting keywords people rarely search.
But informative? Yes. They enjoyed it? Yes. Were they interested? Yes. I built a few thousands RSS subscribers too.
So how do you explain why it works? Perhaps because you are using LSI keywords so you rank for 50 very very long tail keywords for each article? (I have a site with over 1000 pages and receiving traffic from around 18,000 keywords per month. Very long tail.)
Do you even base the "general information" articles on keywords, or do you grab ideas out of thin air, based on what you think will make a good site (that adds value to the niche)?
So yeah, I know how to find topics people are interested in. I can come up with a dozen general information about wireless router or any other niches, even micro niches.
I'm just trying to figure out how to make this more effective.
Believe me, I'm all for doing something. I'm building my 17th Amazon site this weekend.
To Danny: I am not sure I understand you completely so please help me out. I understand the process now. I've built several sites based on your structure. So please understand if I dig into details.
You said, "the more general the word the less Im interested in that."
Do you refer to the main keyword for the site?
Because that was exactly my concern. "how to reset wireless router password", etc. and also "research behind them" type articles are based on general keywords. I bet the OCI is low. There is where I tried to figure out your way of thoughts.
When I look at keyword research tool, I examine search frequency, competitors and OCI. Ranking 1st for a keyword with Local column 500 is better than ranking 10th for Local: 1500. I guess we both agree here, you said this before I think.
So yeah, I never decide upon a keyword only because they have high search volumes. My main question was not that. The reason I said you never mentioned about search volumes because I'm curious if your "general articles" are based on any keyword research at all.
Do you build a site because there is a good commercial keyword, and then come up with supportive content (general articles) regardlress of the keyword volume if the SERP competitors are low?