I have spent literally hundreds of hours reading books and implementing what I've learned into the strategy I'm about to give you. I am passionate about what I do, and hopefully over this article some of that passion will bleed onto you.
It is very important that you spend the time it takes to thoroughly review the keywords in your market before you spend hundreds of hours optimizing your pages, garnering back-links, and submitting to directories.
Building a Killer Keyword List
You can always take your best guess at what keywords people are using the most to find a product or service, but there is a far more efficient way of doing this. There are many tools out there that cut down the time investment considerably. I can't stress enough the importance of an exhausting keyword list. It is campaign-suicide not knowing every last word people use to find your product. If you don't get any other thing out of this article let this sink in: Go the extra length to find hundreds if not thousands of keywords in your market. I've worked on websites that have 40,000+ keywords. If you follow my advice in this article you’ll be able to generate keyword lists in the thousands with very little effort.
Note: It is important to use a bevy of tools when compiling your list, each software has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Here are the tools to build a large list of keywords:
WordTracker offers a free trial (most people use WordTracker’s $250.00 subscription) although it is one of the most acclaimed keyword research tools in the industry it does have its limitations. The thesaurus and misspelled tools are really good for bringing unique variations of your keywords to the table. But those last two options aren’t available in the free version.
Overture Keyword Selector Tool’s free search count data is far more accurate than any of the other tools. Use WordTracker to find many variations of keywords but don't trust its "count" and "predict" data. Rely on Overture's Keyword Selector Tool for accurate search counts.
Note: I would multiply Overture’s keyword search data by 5x's to gauge the demand on Google, and then by 8x's to gauge what the total search demand is amongst all search engines for that word.
Google's Keyword Suggestion Tool also brings some unique keywords to the mix. It might be a good idea to add each individual keyword you get from WordTracker & Overture into Google's suggestion tool and see if there's anything you are missing.
Note: Google usually suggests keywords you would not typically find from the other two tools.
Now, look at every individual page of your site as its own entity. Write down 5 words or phrases that could describe each page on your website. Then take the words and phrases you’ve come up with, use each one individually by entering it in the above tools. I would write an extensive "how to" guide on how to use these tools, but if you can use search engines you can use these keyword search tools.
To cut down time considerably I use new software. It has become a standard in the industry; it's an all in one tool that gathers keyword data from all 3 of the tools I mentioned above. You simply type in a "main keyword" and it searches the databases of Overture, Yahoo, Google, WordTracker, and even your competitions pages for keywords. It than combines all of these keywords for you, and puts them in notepad.
Note: For a controversial review about this new keyword software tool please click here http://www.keywordkingdom.com/keyword_software_s cam_revealed.html
Keyword research is no longer guess work, with the amount of tools at your disposal you no longer have to spend weeks compiling keyword lists for all of the important pages on your site. There's no longer an excuse to find only the "popular & in your face" keywords. You'd be surprised at how many small keyword 'catch' pages you could build that have virtually no competition.
Again, don't just settle for the major words getting all the attention, dig deep, than even deeper until you can't find anything new to add to your main keyword list. You'd be surprised how many people fail to see the value in this. Don’t be one of them.
