Getting Started With Keyword Research

Detailed keyword research is an essential first step for any online business.

Comprehensive keyword research reports are invaluable tools for conducting effective market research, analysis of the competition, managing a profitable paid internet advertising campaign and creating content for a website.

Good keyword research is also very important as you are building traffic to the website with link building. These, and other search optimization and search marketing activities ,are really only effective after extensive keyword research has been completed.

Once the critical first step of keyword research reporting has been completed you can use this report in several different ways.

There are many situations where you may wish to do a quick check on a keyphrase or you may want to add new keywords that you discover from investigating which search terms your website is found by.

In this way, you will constantly want to be updating these lists with more highly targeted keywords and more. Keywords, search volume, and, most importantly, competition does change over time.

Let's get started by creating a comprehensive list of keywords for our target market niche or business.

First, search Google using a few words relating to your chosen product or niche. At the bottom of each page of results you'll find a few suggested keywords.

Paste all these and the word or words you searched with into notepad. Once you have collected 10 or more keywords and key phrases, save the document.

You now have a good list of seed keywords for use in creating a more detailed keyword list. Now check out Freekeywords.wordtracker. There's no need to create an account.

Copy and paste or type in the first keyword or key phrase on your list. A list of up to 100 keywords will come up based on what you entered. Now, take this list and copy and paste to notepad.

Save this document, giving it a name related to the seed keyword you entered.

From this list of keywords, you can select the hyper linked key phrase and then you are shown a list of up to another 100 keyword phrase for that keyword phrase.

Simply complete the above steps with each list, progressively "drilling down" to the more highly-targeted keywords.

Some of these may be clearly unrelated to your niche or product. Discard them. If there are any real general keywords that may apply in a number of other areas, then discard those, as well.

Once completed, this process should give hundreds, if not thousands of keywords to work with. With this list you can learn much more about your competition and determine the best strategy to market and grow your online business.

In the next article we will discussing using this list find out who's searching for what and how many websites are competing for those potential visitors.

Brad Davidson Writes for http://www.competitionreporting.com about topics related to search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Brad writes about internet marketing to help improve his own knowledge as well as to share what he learns with others who may be interested in keyword research, paid advertising competition, organic search placement results and more.