Quick & Dirty (and Free) Way to Find Keywords?

If you want to grab top ranking at Google quickly (in less than 30 days or even 1 week):
choose 100 or even 1,000 long tail keywords that low competition.

If you are patient to see the results that you hope... in 3 - 6 months
choose 10 short tail keywords and diligently acquire backlinks for them.

So, there is no rigid formula. All depend on you.

I personally use https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool for researching keywords. It is free. I love it! Never use paid keyword research software.

Sometimes I think people get too hung up on keywords. Choose a topic that interests you (you = your friend). Then start writing about it. The longtail keywords choose themselves.

Do some background research into what other people are writing about on that topic. What questions people are asking about on that topic. What products/services are available.

The problem with "keyword research" imho is that it leads a lot of people to write ureadable, keyword stuff, rubbish. You know the sort of thing:

"if you are searching for information on green widget disease you've come to the right place. Many people are searching for information on green widget disease. If you have green widget disease then read on and you will find all you need to know about treatments for green widget disease."

A waste of time and space and totally uninformative. Just write - as if you are writing an email to a friend about the topic. You'll include more longtail keywords than you could ever imagine and the visitors will start to come.

If you start with niche you don't know enough information.
The good place to start is to finding the forum talking about your targeted niche.

See what hot topic and the question always be asked.

After get the idea, start with google keyword tool
export data and filter only 3 words up

Find the good demand keyword and using free add on like Seo Quake to analyze on page seo for your competitions.

Hi

I would look at magazines in the niche.

Just go to your local magazine store or giant bookstore and look through the magaines that target the niche. If you don't want to go to a store, you can go to magazines.com but you can't browse through the issues online.

What do you get from magazines?

You see the content (articles) the magazine is using to attract readers in that niche.

You see the eye grabbing headlines designed to get people in that niche to pick up the magazine.

You see letters to the editor from real readers in your niche offering their opinions and ideas about what they want/need in the niche.

You see the advertisers and can see what companies are marketing what products to your audience as well as how they are marketing to them.

Reading through a few magazines (go to the library and sit for an hour) will give you a lot of insight into a nich.

Mahlon

Just a tip: If you already saw a top performing niche website then put their website/pages on Adwords tool on website options, it will automatically give you an idea of keywords they are optimising.

Regards,

Ronnie