17 Apr 09 SEO SIMPLIFIED: Keyword Research Part – II

In the last three articles on keywords, we have talked about every aspect of keywords and key phrases, about its nature, its length and its uses. As the background is now prepared, we should take our discussion on keywords forward, and finish this four-article long discussion with keyword research, and the art and science of finding keywords suitable for your website.

Before going to the science part of the keyword research, let’s first talk about the art part. As discussed in the last article, competition and volume of searches per day are two major criteria on which the keywords related decisions should be based. But how to find which keyword will be related to which field? Well, the answer my friend is common sense, and common knowledge.

We get common knowledge from the everyday experiences that we have. If you are not some alien visiting earth for the first time then you will not enter physics or anything other than terms related to marketing, if you are looking for websites that deals with marketing books, and other marketing related resources. We start by entering one generic keyword related to the field in which we are planning to build our business. For continuity sake, let’s take “Marketing books” as the keyword around which we want to make a website. But before going further with the search, we should talk about the science part, about the tools that we need to use in order to conduct the keyword research. There are many tools, paid as well as free, available on the Internet that will assist you in finding the right keyword for your website. In this article, I will give you a brief list of five good free keyword research tools. The five free keyword tools that will come handy in your research are:

1. Google Adword Keyword’s tool
2. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
3. KeywordTracker Keywords (Free Version available)
4. VRE (Virtual Real Estate) Tool bar (Gives Overture output. Overture is Yahoo’s property)
5. Keyword Discovery (Free Version available)

My personal favourite among all is Google Adword Keyword tool. For this article, we will use Google Adword keyword tool to help us find keywords related to “Marketing books.”

If we enter “Marketing books” in the designated area of Google Adword keyword tool then we will get a list of keywords like “marketing books,” “marketing management book,” “marketing book,” “internet marketing book,” “marketing textbook,”, “marketing ebooks,” etc.

As you can see all the keywords and related suggestions in the result are relevant to the “marketing books” niche. Now, the second step in the process of finalizing keywords is to find out which keyword is better for us. To attain this goal, let’s choose one keyword and see what result Google search is producing for that keyword. I chose “marketing ebooks” for the purpose, and upon search in phrase match mode, Google produces 222,000 results. Hence, the keyword has qualified the competition benchmark test. Now, it’s time to see how it fares on the number of daily searches test. The keyword “marketing ebooks” with the Google Adwrod Keyword tool returns 2900 as a result against average search volume of last 12 months, whereas it says 4400 people searched for the keyword “marketing ebooks” in the month of March. This is confusing, isn’t it? To get a better idea about the search volume, you can also study the search volume trends. This feature can be activated from the drop-down menu beneath the label “Choose columns to display.” Once you are confident with the tool, you can also start digging deeper to get more precise results.

As found, the keyword “marketing ebooks” has around 100 searches per day, and the competition for this niche is also just 222,000. Hence, this keyword qualifies for the future website. We should choose not more than 3 keywords for your website. There are more to keywords, like keyword placing, keyword ranking, etc., and we also need to know the proper way in which the selected keywords or key phrases can be used within the content.

Tags: Art And Science, Common Knowledge, Common Sense, Continuity, Decisions, Discovery, Everyday Experiences, Free Keyword Research, Free Version, google, Keyword Research Tools, Keyword Suggestion Tool, Marketing Books, Phrases, Physics, Related Resources, Sake, Tool Bar, Virtual Real Estate, Visiting Earth