Keyword research is an important part of any online business and collecting a list of important keywords to attract users to your site can be daunting. Whether you’re developing a pay-per-click campaign or looking for effective keyword content, these five keyword research tips may help you find the right target keywords.

Brainstorm
Make a list of all the obvious keywords that could be associated with your site. Try to think of every variation possible including plurals.

Competition
Try each word on your list in the search engines and make note of the top ten sites for each word. If there is a trend to certain sites appearing regularly, check the keyword meta tag in their page source code. Are there any keywords that your could add to your keyword research list.

Research Tools
Now that you have a set of basic keywords it is time to use a keyword research tool to drill down for related keywords. There are many tools that also enable you to check the number of searches made for each keyword – if keywords get 10 or more searches each day, note them down, less than 10, delete them from your list.

Search Engines
You will have a lot of keywords now so it is time to really trim them back to a manageable level. Use the search engines now to search for your keywords. Enter the keyword (in inverted commas) and see how many sites are returned.

Prioritize
Make a note of the keywords with the fewest sites returned. You do not want to compete with millions of other entries for one keyword.

Once you have gone through this process, look at some long tail keywords or keyword phrases that could be used. Start to think of questions that users may enter into a search engine. Once you have this list, go back to the search engine and repeat that step. Keyword research is time consuming, however, once you have your list, you can start to target those keywords to effect.

The basic premise of these five steps is to find keywords that have a reasonable number of searches performed each day yet have the smallest competition pool. Whilst this represents a very basic keyword research program, for individuals considering doing there own SEO work, this type of keyword research is a good start.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under 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.