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.

MSN (or soon to be known BING) has been making a small comeback lately. The company once thought of as a joke (and still are by many) in the search space is actually making itself more competitive. They may never be true competitor with Google, but one tool that I find to be very promising is the Search Funnel tool.

With search funnels you can see which search queries people follow up initial search queries with. This is very helpful. If you are building a poetry site, for instance, you can type the word “poetry” into MSNs search funnel tool and see which queries people follow up a search for poetry with. You’ll see that 9.48% of the searchers search for “poems” after searching for “poetry”. 4.26% search for “love poems”.

Conduct the same test with “search engine optimization” you’ll see that only 1.01% of searchers follow up with a search for “seo” but that 5.05% follow up with a search for “india seo”.

This could be a helpful tool in a number of ways. While you can’t tell why people are searching for what they are searching for, you can use the information to better hone the SEO on your website. Why not use “india seo” as a secondary keyword if you know you have a large potential audience in that region? Secondly, you could use those follow-up queries as primary keywords and build new pages around them. I bet your competition hasn’t thought of that. But you can.

Sometimes it’s nice just to dream. A recent article claimed that artificial intelligence is capable of picking better keywords than humans. I don’t think so. I mean, I DO think so if artificial intelligence is something that I thought were possible. But I’m not so sure that is, other than in those old science fiction movies, I mean.

I suppose there may be a time in the future when computers can think better than humans. There are some computers that can beat humans at playing chess. But we’re talking about average humans and above average computers. Still, I think there’s something to be said for the human touch.

Human beings are social animals. That means we like to interact with each other. And as long as we enjoy each other’s company and interacting with other humans, it doesn’t matter how good a computer is at something. There will always be a market for human-oriented businesses. Even in selecting keywords for your search engine optimization and search marketing campaigns.

Many search engine optimization experts talk about something called keyword density. Supposedly, if you put just enough keywords into your content it’s like swallowing a magic pill. Instant rankings. The only thing is, it doesn’t work that way.

Because the search engines have so many different factors for ranking websites for certain keywords, it is difficult to predict just which factor will be the favored one on any given day. It is much better to put your keywords into the right places and not worry about the right amounts. When it comes right down to it anyway, you can have too much and you can have too little. Why spend all your time guessing which is which?

I’m here to say that you can have just the right amount of keyword density and not get ranked for you important keywords. That’s because factors like domain age, inbound link relevance, domain keyword optimization, and h tags on someone else’s web page can trump your keyword density.

Webmasters should spend more time learning the ins and outs of optimization and quit guessing density patterns. That’s the old way of doing things and keyword density hasn’t mattered for about five years. The smarter and more sophisticated the search engines become in their approach to ranking information, the less keyword density matters. Natural language optimization has almost killed the keyword density discussion anyway. Another couple of years and there won’t even be a slight chance of resurrection. Let keyword density take care of itself.