Keyword Research Basics

Generating keywords, whether for advertising or for website content production, is not a hard thing to do. Recently, I've written about the dreaded "keyword paralysis" effect that plagues many online entrepreneurs. You can do too much research and not enough production, thus stymieing your efforts online to make money or generate traffic. For a new site or article, this is how I start things off:

What's my niche? Is it Hamsters? If it's hamsters, is my site targeting hamster owners? Ok, let's go with that. I first open up my trusty dusty keyword search tool, and I have a couple, but for this exercise I'll use keyword research pro. There's a bunch of reasons why I'm using this keyword analysis tool, but let's just roll with it. Once it's fired up, I'll punch in my seed word. What's a seed word? It's the top level word from which the program will generate all the other keywords that people are using to search within the niche. Once my program returns the top 100 keywords from my root seed keyword, I now have a bunch of information I can play with.

And play I will! First I analyze how many searches per month in google that particular keyword phrase is getting. Next, I'll analyze the number of competitors that are using that keyword as well. I try to focus on keywords that have less than 10k competitors using that keyword phrase and at LEAST 5,000 searches a month. Why 5,000? It shows that there's some activity worth investigating within a 30 day period.

Why just Google, you may ask? Because it's the king of the search engines, pure and simple. And if I can't rank well in Google for a certain keyword, I may have a chance to rank well in MSN or Yahoo. I generally do a lot of on page SEO with content and utilize keyword rich domain names to help facilitate good rankings on the other engines (and not just Google).
So there you have it: start with a seed word for your niche, develop a series of long tail keywords, and then analyze those keyword phrases for traffic and competitors. After all that- DO something with that info and don't succumb to keyword paralysis. This is the same strategy I use every day. Most of this article was developed focusing on a certain keyword and then populating the text with various long tail keywords. Who knows, maybe some of you reading this article found it by typing in "pure and simple". Good luck in your keyword searches!