An important part of any online business is doing keyword research and rounding up a list of important keywords to attract surfers to your site (think SEO). Whether it is for your pay-per-click campaigns or for creating content pages for your site, these keyword research tips will help you find targeted keywords.

Step 1 – Brainstorm You should make a list of all the obvious keywords that come to mind. Don’t limit yourself and get all the related terms in on big list. For example, if I was doing a weight loss site, I would start with the obvious ones like;

weight loss diet-losing fat-exercise-healthy eating

Step 2 – Check the competition. With the list I just made, I would try each of them in search engines and notice the top ten sites that come up in the results. I would then check the keyword meta tag in the HTML source code. I would note every keyword and write them on my list. This is an important keyword research tip. Your are taking notice of your competition in order to beat them right?

Step 3 – Keyword list drill down. You now have a list to work with. It is now time to expand your search. Check out http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and use this tool to see how many searches every day there are for your keywords and note every related keywords that get at least 10 searches a day. You can also use Google keyword research tool. List every misspelled keywords also. Some people use “web site” while others type “website”. Remember that hyphens are treated as space by search engines.

Step 4 – Sizing up the competition. You should have hundreds if not thousands of keywords on your list by now. Make sure you clean up your list for non-related terms. For example, If my weight loss site doesn’t have anything to do with Atkins diet, ditch any keywords that include “Atkins”. Use Google to see how many competing sites you have for your keywords. Just use quotes around your keywords to see how many phrase match you get. Notice how many competing results you get.

Step 5 – Prioritizing Your should now concentrate on using the keywords with less than 15000 competing results. Use those in your articles, content web pages, etc.

Using software for keyword research will save you a lot of time. some have an added feature that list the number of pay-per-click campaigns for those keywords. This is very useful when you want to see how much it will cost you for competing in this area.

Use every keyword that will bring you the most targeted visitors. You will find it is much easier to get on the first page of search engines with keyword phrases that have at least 3 or 4 terms.

After all this work, your keyword research tips will put you ahead in the search engines ranking.

Watch the video related to Keyword research

Follow along in part 2 of our tutorial on niche research. In this video, we cover using the Google Keyword tool and Wordtracker keyword tool along with a basic Google search to determine traffic levels and how easy it is to rank for a given keyword. Follow the whole series at www.wpcontempo.com.

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About Author

Alain Tanguay is a home business entrepreneur that gets hundreds of targeted visitors each months. Subscribe to his
free newsletter packed with useful tips at http://www.flashnetbiz.com

Having your website up and running is the first step, but one thing that I learned from Michael Cheney is that you need to optimize your website for your specific keywords, so that you can start climbing in the search engine ranking.

Keyword research will make SEO so much faster and PPC so much cheaper. And you can do this research for FREE with the tools I’ll show you!

Here are some of the tools that I use for my keywords research:

- Market Samurai (free!)
- Google Keyword (free!)
- www.spyfu.com (free!)
- www.wordtracker.com (free trial)
- www.hexatrack.com (free!)
- www.KeyCompete.com (free trial)

What you are doing with your keyword research is you are narrowing your market into your specific niche. You are using a laser beam instead of a flashlight.

So instead of a broad market like?computers, you could narrow it down:

Computers → Laptop computers → Apple Laptops → iBook

See how you have just taken a broad market search term with a ton of website and competition, down to a specific niche with fewer websites and less competition.

You are targeting your specific customer this way too.

You are essentially carving your own slice of cyberspace on the internet with your keyword, that you will then create websites, articles, videos and other content around your keywords.

The coolest thing about the tools I’ve shown you earlier is that as you are searching for your keyword, you are arming yourself with a TON of competitive intelligence and know how to set up your website the right way the first time:

- Competition- who is using you keyword?

- Volume- how many searches a day?
- Trends- are they steady, increasing, declining, or seasonal?
- Commercial intent- how likely is someone to buy something from you based on searching for your keyword?

The commercial intent is one of the coolest things for you and me?because who do we want? Buyers!

We want them to buy from us because of the content and the value that we are giving away.

You want to do your keyword research not only to figure out where the niche is.

You want to make sure that as you’re building pages you’re using that keyword research data and figuring out through PPC which ones are converting the best to then go and build out your websites.

This will tell you what keywords to write articles about or what keywords to go build Squidoo pages around.

Watch the video related to Keyword research

Effective niche keyword research using Google. Let Google tell you exactly what niche keywords it wants using this little used but highly effective tip from Ade Martin www.AdeMartin.com

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