Search engine optimization comes with many steps and efforts but at the end of the day it all start with your website. Before you think about generating links and other search engine marketing efforts it is important to take a deep breath and jump into the pool of keyword research. The key is to research highly targeted keyword phrases that directly relate to the content you have written for each page of your website. Remember the search engines rank individual pages for specific keywords, not entire websites, so it is important to spend the time conducting keyword research properly.

Here are some areas to look at when starting your keyword research:

1. Google Analytics: If you have Google analytics set up on your website it already has a list of existing keywords that are attracting visitors to your website. This is a great starting point. Punching in each word into your keyword research tool will generate a nice list you can than dwindle down.

2. Competition: Do you currently have competitors that have well optimized websites? It is not a bad idea to take a look at their website and eyeball the meta information and content to see what types of keywords they are using. I don’t recommend copying content or meta information because that is just wrong but getting a feel for how they use the same types of keywords is ok.

3. Long Tail Keywords are Okay: When conducting keyword research don’t be scared to use long tail keywords that don’t necessarily have a tremendous amount of search volume. We are conditioned to want to go after the short high search volume keywords but neglecting the long tail is not the right approach. You have to remember that everyone in your industry is targeting those already. It is ok to go after them because naturally your website will target those types of keywords already but the long tail keywords can generate some good quality traffic fairly quickly.

4. Industry Buzz Terms: Don’t forget about searching for industry buzz terms to target on your website as well. Depending on your industry you could generate a very decent amount of traffic for your website if your business is in an industry that uses a lot of industry type terms.

5. Singular and Plural: Make sure to conduct research for terms using singular and plural forms of certain keywords. Sometimes the difference in search volume can be very drastic so don’t forget to keep this in mind when conducting your keyword research.

6. SEO Keyword Research Tools: There are several great keyword research tools to consider when conducing keyword research. Keyword Discovery is the best keyword research tool that I would recommend on the market…it is the tool that I personally use. I do not recommend using free keyword research tools as many of them tend to not show accurate and search data.

In addition to my keyword research tips, I located a video that show some great advice for basic keyword research:

Keyword research is probably the most important aspect of all your search engine optimization efforts (besides the content on your site of course!). These keywords will dictate what type of visitors you will target for your website so it is important to not only get them right but really not miss out on any that might generate a really targeted visitor for your website. So spend some time developing the relevant keyword list for each page of your site…all of your hard work will pay off if you give it the proper time!

Keyword research is a very important step in website development and search engine optimization. I’ve talked to some Internet marketers, newbies of course, who purchase a domain name before they do their keyword research, if they do it at all. Why? It is pretty well established that your keyword in your URL is a very important aspect of search engine optimization and attaining the rankings you want for your website.

There are some simple basics to keep in mind for keyword research, however. It’s a simple process, but if you go about it wrong you could end up in the wrong business, so to speak.

No. 1, there are two sides of the keyword equation. Supply and demand.

The supply is how many websites that are targeting a specific keyword. Just go to each of the search engines and type in a keyword and see how many websites come up for that keyword. That’s your supply number.

Demand is the reference to how many people are searching for your keyword each month. Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker and a few other tools are available to help you figure that out. But what you want to do is get your hands on the number of people who are conducting searches for each of your potential keywords.

Next, you need to figure out the profitability potential of each keyword. Some people call it a keyword effectiveness indicator (KEI), or index.

To figure your KEI you’ll divide your demand number by your supply number. In other words, if Google shows 1,000 websites for the keyword phrase “redheaded midget wrestling” but you find that 400 people per month are searching for that phrase then your KEI will be .4. That’s a 40% ratio.

Of course, this number by itself means nothing. It can only have meaning relative to other keywords. So put all your keywords into a spreadsheet and sort them by KEI. The higher the number the more valuable that keyword is. Even still, a highly valuable keyword may not be any good for your site concept so be sure that you toss out any keywords that doesn’t match your concept.

That’s a quick way to determine a value for your keywords and decide which ones are the most valuable for your website.

Is keyword research a one-time event or an ongoing concern? You might think it’s something you do today and forget about once your site is built, but it’s not. I’ll tell you why.

What’s popular today may not be popular next year. Searchers could be hot on to a particular search phrase one day and move on to another search phrase a month later. I’ve seen it happen.

As a for instance, today searchers may flock in droves to Google “local SEO” but 30 days from now the number of searches for that phrase could drop by 200% while searches for “geotargeted SEO” could rise by 300%. The numbers may change, 150% and 250%, but the principle is still the same. People’s search habits are about as fickle as their voting habits.

Sarcasm aside, if you stay on top of what is popular today in terms of what people are searching for at the search engines, then when what people are looking for has shifted in your industry, you’ll be on top of it. You’ll be in a much better position to react to the market and start targeting those newer search phrases within your search engine optimization efforts – even if on a temporary basis.

Titus Hoskins has been around a long time. He wrote this article that tells about all the keywords tools he uses. Some of them are direct competitors against each other. Actually, all of them are competitors, but a few of them are free. My question is, are all of these tools necessary?

Certainly, keyword research is a necessity for online marketing and the more information you have on your own sites and your competitors’ sites, the more successful you can hope to become. But do you really need to go out and buy 10 different keyword research tools?

If you are a new Internet marketer or a small business person going online for the first time, I’d say just start with one free tool. Google AdWords is the best free keyword research tool there is. It gets the job done and is adequate enough that most paid tools aren’t necessary for the average marketer. If you are an Internet marketer that runs thousands of SEO and PPC campaigns every month or year then you might need something a big more sophisticated.

Using multiple tools isn’t bad. You can often check information against other resources to see how they compare. Just don’t get too married to analyzing every detail. While analysis is important, if you overdo it then you’ll end up spending more time analyzing and less time acting on what you see. Analysis without meaningful action is deadening.

But on keyword research tools, Titus offers a good list. Take your pick and use the ones that provide you with the most benefits.

Court over at The Keyword Academy conducted an experiment at HubPages. She built 100 pages in 30 days and made some pretty decent money. You can read about it here.

The question is, Where do you make your money in the keyword business?

An old friend of mine is a real estate investor. He buys houses cheap, fixes them up and sells them. He likes to say that he makes his money when he buys the house, not when he sells it. The reasoning goes like this: If you pay too much for the house and spend money on repairs then try to sell it you could lose money. In order to make money in the real estate business you have to buy the property at the right price and leave room for the money you’re going to put into repairs. If you expect to sell the property for market value and earn a profit then you have to do your math before you buy the property. If the numbers don’t work, don’t buy.

This principle is the same in the keyword business. If you are going to turn your keywords into profit then you do that by choosing the right keywords to start with. If you pick the wrong keywords then you will likely not make any money or, if you do, you won’t make as much as you could have. You earn your profit on the front end, which means starting in the right place is absolutely imperative. And it doesn’t matter what niche you are in.

The more I perform search engine optimization tasks for myself and my clients the more I realize just how important keyword research is. It is so important that I wouldn’t think of doing anything online until I have performed thorough keyword research and I’m satisfied that after having done this step of the process that I can settle on a particular niche or sub-niche based on my findings. Just to be clear, I wouldn’t go any further into the marketing process until I was sure that I had done enough keyword research.

Whether you are going to use your research for search engine optimization or pay per click advertising campaign, it is a vital step in the process. Even if you are conducting social media marketing, keyword research can be helpful. You don’t want to leave it out.

Here are some of the things that keyword research can help you make decisions on before you even start your marketing:

• The specific niche you want to serve
• Are there any lucrative sub-niches within your niche?
• What the most powerful and profitable keywords within your niche are
• What keywords your competitors are focusing on
• Keyword trending over periods of time
• You can identify keywords that are not useful to you at all
• Potential negative keywords for use in PPC
• How much you can expect to spend on your marketing efforts with the keywords you are planning to target
• Which keywords can easily be placed into groups for more effective management

As you can see, identifying the right keywords is very important – and, I might add, profitable. This step of the marketing process is so important that I wouldn’t even think about marketing online until I’ve done it to satisfaction.

What do you look for in keyword research to develop a niche? Well, it depends on your goals, but primarily I would recommend looking at three key criteria when you are looking at developing a new niche.

1. Search Volume – How many searches are conducting for a particular topic each month? You want to look at this across all major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN). You also want to look for your top 10 keywords. What is the monthly search volume on your most important keywords? Higher is better.
2. Competition – What is your competition like for those keywords? High search volume is often not enough. If you have a moderately high search volume and low competition for a couple of your keywords, that’s better than high search volume and high competition. Lower competition is always better as it means you can exploit the opportunities more.
3. Income Opportunities – How many ways can you make money in that niche? If you just have one way of making money, that will limit your opportunities. But if you can branch out and make money in five or ten different ways then you’ll have a lot more ways to exploit the niche.

In each of these criteria, keyword research is very helpful. Very valuable. Keyword research is the most important part of the monetization process. Spend a considerable amount of time in this area and make sure you are looking at all of the right keyword opportunities.

One way to brand yourself and ensure that you give yourself an edge over your competition by telling your potential customers what your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is right off the bat is to use the correct keywords. USP is Unique Selling Proposition. What distinguishes you from the competition? You can right to the heart of that with your keywords before you ever start your search engine optimization efforts. The key is in the proper keyword research and keyword selection.

You need to analyze your competition’s marketing and see what they are doing first. If your competition has a particular keyword wrapped up and you know it will be difficult to overtake them, try instead to find a keyword that they aren’t doing so well on. Brand yourself for that keyword and dominate the search market for it instead. But how can you identify those keywords?

Understand that search habits change every 3-6 months. What’s hot today may not be hot tomorrow and will likely not be popular next year. So it’s important to examine and re-examine your keyword list on a regular basis. When you see unique opportunities to capture a keyword in your niche, take it, because if you don’t someone else will. But keyword research is the key to finding good opportunities so make sure you do the proper research and take advantage of the opportunities.

Keyword modification is a useful concept if you plan to make the maximum use of your keyword management for SEO. The key to modifying your keywords properly is to take your primary keyword and use it in its multiple variations. For instance, if your primary keyword is “ski vacation”, there are a number of ways that you can utilize this phrase other than using that specific phrase as it is. You can pluralize it (ski vacations), turn it into a verb (ski vacationing, or vacation skiing), or split it up with words in between (ski while on vacation).

Keyword modification, however, is not just simply using the modified phrases on the same page with your primary keyword and there is more to it than simply adding new pages to your static website. It is a particularly useful technique for bloggers who write about a topic every day. You likely have a list of keywords related to your topic, and you should. If your keyword list contains 100 key phrases and each of them has 10 different variations that are potentially helpful for you then you’ve just expanded your keyword list to 1,000. Your list, however, is likely larger than 100. If your list has 300 useful keywords on it then you can turn that list into a list of 3,000 just by thinking up useful variations.

That’s not to say you have to use every keyword variation you can think of. But it helps to know that you can use the variations when you need them. Search engine optimization is not all about using the exact phrase every time you include a keyword phrase in your content. It is usually best to write in a natural language sort of way and to include your keyword phrases as necessary to make the language flow well for human readers.

Search engine optimization is a constant process. It never ends. And only has a beginning because, well, don’t all things have beginnings?

Sarcasm aside, you know you need keywords and you know you should employ them intelligently, but do you know that you should review your keywords from time to time to see which ones are the most effective? Search patterns change. Search behavior changes. What is popular today may not be popular tomorrow, next week, or next year. That’s why it is important to monitor your referrer logs and see what it is that people are searching for to find your website. You should also monitor search trends in your niche and see what it is searchers are looking for right now.

But how often?

I’d say it’s a good idea to review your referrer logs with an in-depth analysis to see what keywords people are finding your site for and to identify new opportunities at least every three to six months. You should monitor search trends and respond to them monthly. By reviewing your keyword list every so often you can ensure that you are on top of the latest trends in your niche and identify the opportunities in a timely manner so that you can capitalize on them at the right moment.