How To Discover Awesome Keywords for Internet Marketing Research

Finding keyword phrases that will help you get traffic is one of the primary ways webmasters make money on the internet. If you target keywords that are too competitive, you’ll be spending a lot of time with very little to show for it. If you can find keyword phrases that have little competition or that will require less work to achieve a top ranking in the search engines, you’ll be able to get traffic to your website.

Start your research by brainstorming a list of keyword phrases that match what your website will be about or what you believe people are searching for when you want them to find your website. I’ve found that using a spreadsheet is the best way to keep track of your keywords. If you don’t currently own Microsoft Office, you can use Google Docs or OpenOffice.

Once you’ve looked for those broad keywords, start looking for keyword phrases that match even more closely what you’re going after. These 3+ word keyword phrases are usually known as “long tail” keywords. These longer keyword phrases usually represent an individual that is much closer to making a purchase or making a decision on a service.

There are a couple of websites that can be used to determine how many searches are done on a monthly basis. Once you determine this, add this information to your spreadsheet. It will come in handy when you need to see which keywords are worth pursuing vs. those that will be a waste of time. The two websites that you’ll be using are Google Adwords keyword tool and the freekeywords.wordtracker.com website. Both of these will give you keyword ideas and the number of monthly searches.

With the reports on how many searches per month you’ll have from the free tools, you’ll also need to find the competition. The easiest way to do this is to find out how many websites Google or the other search engines have in their index that contain that keyword phrase. The less competition, the better.

There are a few ways to narrow the competition to determine which keyword phrases are the best. The tools I use are the advanced search features available through Google. I use the allintitle, the allinanchor, and the search with the keyword phrase in quotes. People don’t typically search that way, but remember that you are collecting data and not trying to mimic the search patterns of 99% of internet users.

When evaluating which keywords are “good” keywords or good keyword phrases, you can usually tell after you’ve been doing this a while. I usually start with keyword phrases that get at least 100 searches per day. Obviously the more searches per day, the better. As far as competition, I usually look for keyword phrases with less than 10,000 allintitle results. The lower the competition, the better.

When you have your keyword phrases found, you’ll be ready to start implementing those keywords into the website. There are strategies you can use on your website or on any web 2.0 properties that will help you get your website ranked in the search engines. Finding these strategies is a matter of researching search engine optimization.

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