How do YOU do keyword research? Tips & Tricks

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When I choose a keyword, I check the results in quotes. Then, I normally go for 4000-10000 competing pages.
Second stage I would check the first 5 competing sites. If they have less than 100 backlinks on them, I will go for the keyword.
Nothing special, but works fine for me. It takes me roughly a month to get to first page with some heavy backlink work and then it is all about keeping up there

There are a few things I use;
keywordspy - to see where the traffic is coming from
webceo - to see what keywords all my competitors are targetting
google keyword tool
opensite explorer - to see what anchor text websites are using.

Once I have a list of keywords, I put them in Google keyword tool. Then I do this equation;

(1-competition) x total local searches.

This gives you the highest searched, lowest competition keywords in order.

I find magazines a great way to coming up with fresh ideas to start the search process. I then add in an idea into a search tool and keep my eyes peeled for keywords with a large broad number of searches.

I use these broad terms as my seeds for even more ideas. I keep seeding out until I start getting duplicates or the broad numbers are getting low (<2000/day). I then switch over to exact in each seed list and start doing the competition analysis to find the words worth targeting.

I now have a large group of keywords from the same niche all broken up into different categories. I then sort the list based on difficulty and start writing content for the easy ones, working down the list.

• Do you only go after high traffic, low competition? - Low competition is more important than high traffic. The number 1 spot on a low searched term is often more valuable than spot 7 on a high searched keyword.
• If so, how do you define "high traffic, low competition"? - It is all relative. High traffic (to me) is 1000+ a day.
• At what point will you go after competitive keywords? - When I start seeing movement for the competitive term in webmaster tools. I select my keywords so that they containg a more competitve but higher searched term. Often promoting the long tail will help the competitive term too.

Personally, I dont' worry about the number of competeing pages, I only worry about the strength of the competition in the only search engine that really matters--Google. And I assess it against the only sites that matter--the top 10.

I pay particular attention to the top 5, because in most cases, if you can't break into the top 5, you aren't going to see much traffic unless the volume is huge.

The estimate is that 80% of all clicks go to the top 3 results, and 90% to the top 5 (above the fold), with the top result estimated to get 50% - 65% of all clicks. That means if you're in position 8 for a 3,000 a month word (100 searches a day), don't expect much.

As I write this I have a site in position 7 for a keyword that gets 12,000 exact match searches a month according to GAKT (about 400 a day) and I get between 10-20 clicks a day. Every now and then the site pops up into position 2 or 3 for a few days. When that happens, my clicks go up to 120 - 180 a day. That's a big jump. BIG. It's that important to get into the top three.


When I look at keyword competition, I look at the following things in order of importance:

• Google PageRank of the page
• Google inbound links to the page
• Yahoo inbound links to the page
• Google PageRank of the domain
• Yahoo links to the site

The easiest way to check this information is to get the SEOQuake plugin for FireFox. I'm not going to explain how to use it, you can figure that out for yourself. Suffice to say it will give you all the above information right in the Google results page.

Google PageRank of the page

This is the most important for me. I look at the page rank for each of the pages listed in the top 10. What I look for:

• Nothing higher than a PR 4
• At least half the results (5) are PR 1 or PR 0
• At least 1 of the pages in the top 3 is a PR 1 or PR 0

If these requirements aren't met, I toss the keyword.

Google inbound links to the page
Unlike Yahoo, Google doesn't show all inbound links. I have sites that rank well that don't show any inbound links in Google. Nevertheless, I check this for the top 3, maybe 5 (depends on volume estimates). I'm looking for results that have 10 or fewer inbound links. If there are inbound links, I'll check out the sites the links are from to see how strong they are in terms of PR (I want < 5) and how old the domain is (the younger, the better).

Yahoo inbound links to the page
Don't be surprised when you run into pages with zero Google inbounds, yet have hundreds or even thousands of Yahoo inbound links. I look for 250 or less here. One of the key things to look for is how many different sites the links come from. It's not uncommon to run into a page with a few hundred inbound links, yet when you dig into it you see 90% of them come from one domain.

The fewer the number of sites the links come from, the better.

Google PageRank of the domain
Just because a page is a PR 0 doesn't mean the domain is. I find PR 0 pages inside of sites with PR 5 or even higher. If the domain PR is 4 or higher, I probably won't go after that keyword. My gut feeling is that even though page PR is low, the site isn't, which might make the page harder to beat.

Also, depending on who's running the site, if they get wise and do some internal linking, they could easily make the page stronger, thus nullifying all your hard work.

Yahoo links to the domain
I look at this for the same reason I look at domain PR; I want to get more of a complete picture of the strength of the site. Ideally, I like to see 1,000 or fewer inbound domain links. The same thing applies here as far as the number of domains the links are from: the fewer the better.

I ran into a domain the other day that showed 800+ links, but when I started looking at it, I saw they all seemed to come from different pages on one domain. So it was a site-wide link like in a footer or blog roll. When I counted the actual number of different domains, the result was only 7!

A lot of effort to do all this, I know, but it seems to pay off.

My head is spinning.....

I simply using Google Keyword Tool to find my keywords. Google is the master database for storing these keyword info. So to me its keyword tool is good enough for me to identify good keywords and knowing its competition.

I use market samurai for doing keyword research! Its great tool!

Many nice reply and need hard effort to follow...

I choose keywords after keeping these three points in my mind:

1. They hare relevant to my content.
2. They have relatively high search volume
3. They have relatively low competition

I use the Google KWT, and my method is similar to WebDangos. The only real difference is that I often go for higher competition phrases if the potential rewards are great enough.

Having said that, most of the higher competition phrases I target are keywords where I notice I'm already ranking on page 2 or 3 because of SEO I've done for less competitive keywords. In these cases I figure it's worth putting in a bit of effort to try and bump my site up the SERPs - I rarely go for competitive phrases right from the start.

I just use Market Samurai - so far, it is not letting me down! :-) You can find there everything you need.

First I'll type the <keyword> in Google Adwords Keyword Tool and get the result. then I observe top competitor for that keyword and analysis that which keywords they used.Some keywords suggest by google are also good.

These sites are very helpful if used right:

SEMRush - service for competitors research, shows Google organic and AdWords keywords for any site or domain

SpyFu