Keywords are important, as they can ramp up SE traffic for any website. The more “good” keywords you can target, the more visitors you can reach. Now, “good” ain’t a very descriptive word. What is good for me may not be as good for you and vice versa. I’ve been doing some keyword research over the past few months, so I’ve devised a set formula that works for me. What I do is:

- Find out a number of keywords, brainstorming the mainstream niche and the niches that float around it.
- Finding out which keywords are “good”, and removing others.

Now what is “good” here?

A keyword that has:

- 500+ searches a month.
- Less than 100,000 competition within quotes.
- Low SoC (Strength of competition).

With practice, you’ll be able to find them pretty easily. There are some tools which could help you, such as the Google KeyWord tool, SEOBook Keyword Tool. Another one that I absolutely love is Micro Niche Finder. It’s paid, but absolutely worth every penny.

For an example, let’s do some keyword research in the Debt Niche. I go to Google Keywords tool and find out how many searches the main keyword gets. It’s around 16 million a month from what I can see. Cool, so I know this is something mainstream. I’ll brainstorm a few keywords that float around this one.

debt;
get rid of debt;
credit card debt;
debt management;

Alright, so now head over to eZine articles and on the top, there is a Search box. Enter your main keywords one by one in on there. Why are we doing this? I’m not sure you’ll see many people do this – but there’s a solid reason behind. Most of the times, the articles you’ll find – the authors have done their keyword research already and thus we’re just benefiting from it. Alright, so when you search and reach a related article, right click and go to View source. Then note down their keywords and save them on your computer.

Then go to some social bookmarking sites such as Jumptags and others, search for your niche, note down the tags as keywords. Repeat this with as many keywords as you possible could. I’ll look around for at least 100-150 of such keywords, and they’re pretty damn easy to find out. We’ll narrow them down to 50 or so in the next step.

Now, once you’ve made a list, we’ll sort out the keywords that pass out test (the three criterias that I mentioned above). How? Use the Google Keywords tool once again, in conjunction with the SEOBook Keywords tool. You’ll see the search volume, then just remove those which are below 500. Now, go to Google and search for the exact keyword under quotes.

Say for an example, I found out that “debt insurance” has 500+ searches a month and just around 65,000 competing sites. I’ll keep that in my list. Doing this, we’ll narrow down our list to approximately 50 keywords.

Now the last but not the least, looking out for the strength of your competition. Numbers aren’t as important as the quality is. Even if a search term has half a million search results, but the first page ranks are dominated by eZine articles pages, then I bet I can knock them off with some proper optimization.

The last step is kind of boring, and many will skip this. Do not skip any of these, because everything is interlinked here, every bit helps you build a solid business online. Please share your thoughts on keyword research via the comments.

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Tags | Keyword Research