Keyword research is an important aspect of SEO. After all it’s the keywords that the visitors type in the search engines to find relevant sites. If you are targeting the wrong keywords, you will get wrong visitors. Make sure that whatever you do, whatever content you write, or whatever page you create – you are targeting the right keywords.

How to do keyword research?

You know your business well, so you are the best person to think about the words or combination of those that can be called “relevant” for your site. Sit down with a piece of paper and write down whatever comes in your mind that you feel are good relevant keywords for your site.

Right now don’t worry about the popularity of the keyword. Once you start gaining experience you can focus on the popular keywords. One reason why you shouldn’t focus on popular keywords straight away is that they are hard to optimize and very costly to buy traffic. Once you have a flow of visitors, you can expand your keyword list to include very popular keywords. By that time you will have some experience to handle popular keywords too.

Ignore single word keywords – they are highly competitive and not well targeted. For example “loans”. There are many types of loans, which one are you targeting? Be specific as far as possible.

Write down at least 50-60 keywords for your site that you think are relevant to your site.

Next look for some keyword research tools online. There are many. I have written a few at the end of this article. Most of them offer top searched 10 or 20 keywords for free. For example if you type “loans”, they will return most searched top 10 or 20 keywords that has the word “loans” in them.

Now get your sheet of paper where you had written your keywords. Type into the tool your first keyword and drill down. You get a list of 10 or more keywords. Similarly write the second one, and drill down – you get another 10. Got the idea? Keep doing this until your list exhausts. You will get a list of about 50*10 = 500 keywords.

This is a good list to start your website marketing campaign.

NOTE: Go through the entire list of keywords. It may be that some of the keywords may contain words that are not very relevant to your business. These are known as negative keywords are not good for your business especially if you are doing PPC to promote your business. Even if your have plans to do SEO, these keywords are not good to target as they may not produce the desired results. Keep in mind that whether it’s SEO or PPC, they both need time and money. You are better off negative keywords.

Another good idea is to visit your competitor’s website and look at the Title, Description and Keywords tag. Your competitors are targeting these keywords. Take out the good ones relevant for your business.

Also look at the words being used in page titles, header tags (H1, H2 etc), and repetition of words in their content.

If you are already getting visitors, you may look into your analytics data. If you are not using any analytics software (it’s advisable that you do so), you can look into your web-log files provided by your hosting company. This will give you a good number of keywords that are already helping you to get traffic. See what combination of these can also be targeted.

Whatever you do, keep in mind that your ultimate goal is to get traffic that converts well. What’s the point in getting 1000 visitors a day that don’t take any action on your site?

These keywords will decide the “quality” of visitors to your site. Take your time, but target the right keywords.

Some recommended keyword research tool:

1)     Google AdWords: Keyword Tool (Free)
2)     Wordtracker
3)     Trellian’s Keyword Discovery