A successful SEO campaign has many factors that make it effective. You will need a website that is search engine friendly, has well written content, several back links from quality sites and an aged domain that spells “authority”. However, if you have taken care of all these aspects and not spared a single moment on the keywords that you should use, your effort will not serve its purpose. If you are unaware of how important keywords are, what keywords to target, don’t know how much competition is there while you try to get traffic/page rank via these keywords, you will not be able to grow your online business.

So, first things first – keywords are those phrases or bunch of words that web surfers use to find something online. Unless you list and use words that the web surfers are likely to use as their search term to find your products/services, you will not get visitors to your site and will be lost among the numerous other sites on the Internet.

There are various online tools that will help you to find the appropriate keywords for your niche. Some renowned tools used by several webmasters are:

Google Keyword Tool – A free to use tool that shows you the advertiser competition, search volume, estimated ad position and estimated average CPC for the particular search term.

Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – A free tool offered at Aaron Walls’ site that’s powered by Wordtracker. This tool shows daily search volumes, links these search volumes to related results from global search, offers links to Google AdWords price estimate tool, provides links to keyword research results from Google Trends, Yahoo! Suggest, Google Suggest, Keyword Discovery and Google Synonyms. There is much more information in addition to the above mentioned ones that this tool offers.

Trellian Keyword Discovery – This powerful tool brings together the keyword search statistics from more than 180 search engines over the world. It can help you find search phrases that web surfers use to come across products and services. You can also do keyword density analysis and know what search terms are bringing hits to your competitors’ sites. 

Wordtracker – Though it has the option of a free trial, you will need to pay a fairly reasonable subscription fee to use this tool for the optimum results. The subscription to Wordtracker will enable you to list the most popular and relevant keywords so that you can optimize the content of your website and improve your search campaigns (both PPC and organic). This tool will also help you to explore online markets, find opportunities in your niche and utilize them.

SEMRush.com – This paid tool will help you to conduct keyword research and have data required for advanced SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaign.

KwBrowse – This tool helps you to find relevant keywords for a particular search term. It also shows an alphabetical keyword list and links to some companies that are relevant to the search term.

NicheBOT – This keyword research service uses several keyword sources such as Keyword Discovery, Google and Wordtracker to give the most comprehensive result. You will get access to more than 295 billion keywords that spans 243 countries and is made available in 41 languages.

Keyword Elite – This paid keyword research software will help you to research keywords that are widely searched but don’t have much competition.

Which keyword tool do you use?

The success of your search engine marketing drive depends heavily on how successful you have been with your keyword research. However, your job doesn’t finish once your have researched for the appropriate keywords and listed them. You should also be able to use the results that such a research work has offered.

Keywords are the lifeline of any search engine marketing drive. You will not be able to sustain your online presence unless proper support is given by the keywords. As the choice of correct keywords will bring traffic to your website, you need to research and come up with those keywords that relate to your products/services. Otherwise, your website will not serve any purpose as nobody will visit it.

Choosing the appropriate keywords will help your site get indexed by the search engines in a favorable manner and your site “may” get good search engine rankings for those keywords. Why I am stressing on “may” is that there are many other factors that determine a good rank apart from the keywords. However to get the best results you should use the keywords in your:

•  site domain (…if possible. Of course if the domain is already booked or the site online, there isn’t much you can do about it.)
•  site’s page titles and headlines (very important)
•  content (important)
•  links, both internal and external (…using keywords in anchor text is important)
•  marketing newsletters and online press releases
•  meta tags, and
•  image alt tags

The following steps will help you to conduct keyword research in an effective manner:

Use Research Tools:  Though there are various tools that will help you to conduct keyword research, some of the most trusted ones are Wordtracker, Google’s Keyword Tool and the tool on Aaron Wall’s site named seobook.com. Using a combination of paid and free tools for keyword research could be a better choice as they can give you a wide range of keywords to research on.

Still, if you are starter and have a shoe-string budget, Google Keyword Suggestion Tool is one of the best available online and its free. Try it.

Wordtracker too has a free version available online, but has some limitations. You can try it here.

Get Specific:  Target specific phrases that people are likely to use while searching for your products/services. Remember that web surfers usually use key phrases that are a bunch of two or three words when they search for certain things online. Compared to the single keywords, these key phrases are less generic and can be easily targeted for your search engine marketing purposes.

For example “real estate” may not be a good keyword to optimize for your site. One its too competitive, two it may get visitors from places that you may not be interested in. However “Real Estate in Minneapolis” is a better keyword if your business is primarily focused in offering real estate services in Minneapolis.

Don’t Depend on Numbers:  Don’t believe the number of monthly searches for a particular keyword blindly. Though you should consider this data, pay more concentration to how a specific search phrase fares in terms of relative popularity. You should ensure that enough people will use that keyword when they think of your niche. If not, it won’t be worth your money, time and effort to target these search phrases.

Use Highly Relevant Terms:  As explained above, make sure that your keywords are highly relevant to help you achieve your final objective. If you are selling products or offering a service online, those keywords should be selected that call for an action – be it purchasing the product or ordering the service. Other objectives like getting subscriptions to newsletter and content publications will need more careful planning.

Learn From Your Competitors:  After short-listing of probable keywords, use them to search for competitors. Visit some of the top listed sites and see how their web pages are optimized for particular keywords. This will help you to plan better.

Keep these suggestions in mind in order to reap the most of your keyword research and search engine marketing campaign.