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.

If you could find out what keywords are people searching for you can put yourself right at the front of the line to convert those searchers into buyers, and start to make some money from your sites.

You could try and spend countless hours searching for top keywords to target a website around, and then spend even more time creating a site only to find out that thousands of others are also targeting the same exact keyword too.

What if you could find out what keywords are people searching for in not only a few minutes, but also at just a click of a button? We’ll now you can thanks to a superior keyword software package called Market Samurai.

Market Samurai will not only find you some awesome keywords, but it will also tell you just how many other sites are targeting the same keyword too. On top of that you will also have access to the following information as well.

With the access to stats like the ones above, you will have a behind the scenes look at just what keywords are people searching for right now. This is info that would have taken you forever to get manually.

Since using Market Samurai it has completely changed my keyword research. Not only has it cut down on so much time, but its also found me some killer keywords that have very little competition, leaving me to dominate the search engines and reap the rewards all by myself.

In order to be succesful, websites need to get a significant volume of traffic of good quality. Search engines are the major way that people get to websites today.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of doing activities that will cause the search engines to favor your site and make it prominent. The favored sites will appear among the first results when keywords that relate to them are searched for. SEO software types1. Niche Finders

The scope of topics that can be used to develop a website is as wide as the capacity of the human mind. Anything you can think of or imagine can be the topic of a website. However, if you want to develop a site that will make money or provide you a loudspeaker to express your views, you need to choose a subject area that has a high probability of success which can draw an audience.

In order to be succesful, you generally don’t want to pick a topic that is too large. If your Site Concept is too general, the competition will be fierce. Additionally, powerful companies with large, highly trained staffs will be competing against you to get attention. For example, it would be very difficult to win in the topic of health. All the major hospitals, health providers and health information resources would be competing against you.

You need to select a topic that has a significant level of interest, has low competition and has high profit potential. Even in the health area, a topic like natural cures for ingrown toenails might fit the bill. Those people who are interested in this topic will be highly targeted. If you provide them with useful content, they will become your fans and likely candidates to listen to you and to purchase items that you suggest.

A niche is a subset of a topic that has limited competition and has enough depth to allow for discussion of a few high demand topics.

Software to find a niche automates the process of finding profitable niches.

Myleena Phan, the creator of Niche Inspector, has an excellent description of the manual steps that she used to do prior to creating Niche Inspector. It is available on the web.Niche finder software programs

1. Nichebot

2. Micro Niche Finder

3. Niche Inspector2. Keyword software

Wikipedia says “The term keyword in reference to SEO usually refers to a word or phrase (combination of words, such as ‘Chicago Courier Service’) used to find relevant and useful web pages.”

Once a website creator has found a suitable niche, they need to find keywords related to the niche which are popular and profitable. Keyword software provides this capability. The keyword programs provide some or all of the following;

* ad cost per click

* traffic volume to expect depending on amount paid

* search volume

* competition intelligenceKeyword Programs

1. Keyword Elite

2. Keyword Spy

3. Wordtracker

4. SEOBook Tools4. Tools to produce backlinks

The search engines value sites that have many links pointing to them. If the link comes from an high page rank source, it’s even more valuable. Link building is the most important thing to do in order to rank in the search engines.

The following list describes a number of strategies for increasing backlinks. Many of these approaches are enhanced by software that automates or speeds the process.

A large part of the process for getting links is submitting stuff to websites that publish content that includes a link to your site. The submission process generally consists of selecting a group of target sites, registering, preparing multiple versions of your own site information or an article or other information , submitting the information and then tracking the results. The submission programs provide some or all of these features but generally must be used in a semi automated fashion since there is almost always something that you have to do manually while you’re at the site.Link generation methods and related software1) Submit to Directories

There are directory submission services and there are programs which automate the process of submitting to a directory.Directory submission software

# Fast directory submitter

# Digixmas

# Submiteaze

# Directory Submitter2) Write and Submit Articles to Article Sites

Writing articles for well respected article sites is one of the most effective techniques for getting links to your website. Ezinearticles, for one, is a highly ranked and well respected article site. When you submit your article to them, they give it a thorough review. If your article is chosen for publication that indicates it has been approved by the best and that’s the way that the search engines as well as many surfers view it.

Josh Spaulding has written a very enlightening eBook call Article Marketing Domination that clearly spells out how to take advantage of this method of generating links.

Going from article site to site manually entering article and author information is highly labor intensive. To do this effectively, you need an automated article submission program.Article Submission Programs

1. Article Post Robot

2. Instant Article Submitter

3. ArticleAnnouncer

3) Post Comments in Blogs and Forums Related to Your NicheBlog Finding Software

You want software to find blogs that are dofollow which means that if they link to you, it counts as a link. Blog finding software finds blogs in the topic that you are interested in and can check for dofollow status. They should also allow for a date of last comment setting because a dormant blog is useless.

1. Fast Blog Finder

2. Real Link Finder4) Social Bookmarking

Wikipedia says that “social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata”. The social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, furl and others allow users to nominate articles that they believe are the best on the net and should be publicized. Articles or posts that get a high ranking gain many links and tons of traffic.Social Bookmarking Software

Automarker – Jonathan Leger, one of the net’s leading internet marketers, has developed this program. This allows groups of people to collaborate on voting for each others quality content. A subscriber receives a list of articles to review for promotion and can in turn submit articles for review.5) Videos

Videos are a new hot way to gain links. There are multiple sites to submit videos to and a program to automate submissions to them is a great aid.Video submission software

1. VideoWildfire

2. Video Post Robot4. Website traffic reports

Once a website has been developed, it is important to review the traffic to see where visitors are coming from and how they are getting to you. There are powerful free tools that provide this information and there are a number of companies that offer sophisticated services with all sorts of detailed analysis to maximize one’s website effectiveness.

These reports provide statistics about the number of visitors, pages visited, time on the site, new vs old visitors, source of the visitors, country of origin and more.

Google provides a powerful tool for free to analyze your website’s performance. It is called Google Analytics. You go to http://www.google.com/analytics and register. You need to put some html on every page to allow the statistics to be captured.

Firestats by Omry Dayan is powerful and elegant tool to track your web traffic and statistics. It is particularly well suited for WordPress blogs but may be used on other websites.Summary

There are many programs and tools that can cause your traffic and profits to skyrocket. Take advantage of the programs listed here to get the best the web has to offer.