Keyword research is an important way to build authority for your site, as well as the best way to drive targeted ongoing free traffic. If you are aren’t using keyword research, you should be. If you don’t know how, this article will help you learn how to find good keywords.

What are good keywords?

Everyone throws around the term keyword research, and find good keywords, the problem is most beginning marketers and online entrepreneurs don’t know what those terms mean, or how to do them! At the most basic keyword research is the process of finding words or phrases that are relevant to your site that you can rank well in the search engines for.

A good keyword is a word or phrase that people are actually using in the search engines to find information. You also want to make sure your word or phrase is competitive, but not so much so that you can not beat the other sites competing for this keyword.

Where do I find good keywords?

Finding good keywords is a process. It starts out with brainstorming. You can start with looking at your site. What does your site offer? What do you want your site to be known for? You can do some thinking on these topics before you even start a site and will be ahead of the game.

If you are looking for profitable things to write about you can also check at Amazon, see what the popular things are there. You can also use their categories to start some keyword research and find some tight niches to write about.

Another brainstorming technique, if you are starting out, and don’t have a website it to just look around. Niches are everywhere. Write down every little thing you can see from right where you are. You should be able to build a list at least a page long by doing this.

Once you have some keyword ideas from this brainstorming you are going to take them to the next step which is evaluating these options to see if they are good keywords.

How do I know I have chosen good keywords?

This is a two step process. You want to evaluate both search volume and competition. To evaluate search volume (the amount of people actually using your chosen keyword in search engines) you will need some tools. These tools will show you how many people are searching, and depending on the tool you choose a lot more. You can get started at the source itself, Google. Google now provides search volume on it’s Adwords Keyword Tool.

Take the ideas you’ve come up with and enter them in the search box within the keyword tool. The results will come back, not only for your keyword, but many other suggestions Google will find for you. You want to find keywords with at least 50 searches a day, and of course more searches is fine.

Make sure you take a note of the keywords you find with a good search volume. We’ll take those to the second stage of this process, which is the level of competition.

How much is too much competition?

Competition in keywords is a funny thing. You definitely want some competition. It means people are making money on that keyword. You don’t want too much competition though, or you won’t be able to beat them in the search engine rankings.

So take a look at your keywords in Google. You want to see how many competing pages there are (with your keyword in quotes) you also want to check the page rank of the top listed sites. Another variable you want to measure is the number of links the top sites have. These are the elements you will be competing with these sites on, so you want to make sure you can beat them.

As you can see finding good keywords is a process. It seems complicated and can be overwhelming, but doing good keyword research is the best way to get organic search traffic from the major search engines. Once you know how to do keyword research you can use the information in every aspect of your business, whether it’s building websites, writing posts on blog, writing articles. You name it, and you can use keyword research to increase your business.



By: Jackie Lee