How to do keyword research (Hope this helps you.

Pick a market and find your keywords.

Choose a market you want to go in to, ie... Weight Loss

Go to google keyword tool and type in weight loss, then google will generate a nice list of keywords for you related around this subject.
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal


Out of that broad list find a keyword you can drill down, for example the keyword I found was natural weight loss. Here is the important part, take that keyword, in my case "natural weight loss" and then re put it into google keyword tool.

Now you should have a more niche list, the keywords I got back were...

natural weight loss products
natural weight loss supplements
natural weight loss herbs
natural weight loss supplement
natural weight loss pills
natural herbal weight loss

If you want you can take each one of them keywords and drill it down even further by finding products which relate to them keywords and see the traffic for them products but for the sake of this we will keep it at the list above.

We have now generated a nice list of keywords and are ready to move on with our research.

Google trends time!

If you are looking for a low traffic niche then there will be no data for your keywords. For example "Natural weight loss supplements" gets 3600 monthly searches according to google but has no data on it. That doesn't mean google trends is bad, you are just going to use it to look at your over all market instead to see how the market is doing.

Try your keywords out in trends, if there is no data, take the next keyword up the chain and look at the trends for that phrase. Lets take my example I went back up my ladder back to "natural weight loss". This has been up and down through out the years so this market will remain stable more likely. If it has been trending down through out the years, it means that market is slowly decline in popularity and may not be a long term niche.

This stage is to generally see how your market is trending and to see if it is worth it to carry on, if it is, go to the next step, if it isn't, rinse and repeat.

Title, header, descs, metas, tags, urls, the fun stuff.

This is really crappy bit if you don't have a tool to do this for you, I use market samurai which does this all in one except tags and metas but what you need to do is this.

First create an excel, basically the columns will look like this in the excel.

down the left hand side you will list 1-10 (this is the 1-10 sites ranked in google)

Up the top you will have... URL (The site you are looking at) Title, Header, descs, metas, tags, urls. Basically all you are going to do here is put a yes or no in each column if the site has it or not. The more no's you get, the better the niche is. There will be an added column but more on that later.

Pick the first 10 pages in google and go to view source, look at their title, description, meta keywords and see if your keywords are being used in each. If they are go put a Yes in your excel, if not go put a no.

Find there H1 tags and look if the keyword is also being used in that, if yes put a yes under headers, if no, put no.

Come out of the source code and look at there tags on the site (if they have any, this will tell you the type of things their content is based around. Same again, if your keyword is in there, put yes, if not, put no. Same goes for URLS.

Added note: Bold and h2 - h3 should also be taken into consideration, just glance over them and just have a look at them. Also are your keywords being used in anchor texts on there site, each of these 4 things can effect the hardness of getting ranked number 1.

How many back links does the site have!

What I want you to do first is go put the last column on your excel, put BL (back links) in the last spot. I then want you to go use this tool to see your competitions back links. Backlinks Checker Tool - Backlink Watch

All I want you to do is list down the number of BL's each site has from 1 to 10. Also for a side note, write down how many links they have with your phrase in the anchor text, this could help you later on.

Proxy time.

I just want you to do all the above again while going through a proxy using different areas of the US (I am assuming this is where your market is aimed at, if not use your target country and find a proxy for it). Google indexes places slightly different and by doing this, you will get to see a few more sites you may compete against.

Do I go on?

This is how I determine if I move on or not, ask your self this first, is this a long term competitive niche or something which I just want to get ranked for quickly on a long tail phrase and get little traffic from.

Competitive niche first: Look at the BL's of the top 3 sites, for you to get close to them in the serps you will need to resemble some what close to them BL's to get that market, if you think it is doable then go for it, if not, do all of the above again. I don't really mind if big sites here have titles etc... My main concern is BL's and the quality of content.

Quick niche: If there is over 200-300 BL's I personally think it is to much work for me to go into it. If titles, desc, url and header tags each have the keyword phrase in it. I tend to forget it and just move on, its to much hassle for me anyway.

Thats how I judge if a market is worthy or not.

A little extra to look out for.

Some say having the keyword in the URL is crucial, I don't always look for this but that is not to say you shouldn't. Try get your main key phrase in the URL.

THIS IS KEYWORD RESEARCH, NOT MARKET RESEARCH. (There is still a lot more research to do to see if a niche is viable.)

I hope this helps you anyway, if anyone would like to add a phase of the keyword research please post and ill add it in. If you think something is wrong with the research, please let me know, I don't want to miss lead anyone but from experience, that works for me.