Keyword research is the one of the most important things you can learn how to do in any kind of online marketing efforts. If you don't know what your customers are searching for and, more important, what they are calling it when they do a search, there’s no point in having a website. A couple of easy steps to get you started are as follows:

Go to Google Keywords Tool

Type in the generic name for your product or services. For example, let’s say we’re going to make a list for a real estate agent. You would type in "real estate agent"

As you can see above, "real estate agents" had a million searches in the last month. This illustrates the importance of keywords in searches. If you’re a real estate agent, you probably want a piece of that pie, so make your site about all about the fact that you are a wonderful real estate agent, and then wait for the traffic to your site to increase significantly......... still no traffic.

You need first to go to how Google sorts and ranks pages. If you remember nothing else, remember that 70% of how a page is ranked has nothing to do with the website. Many people have spent lots of money on a pretty website and end up with nothing to show for it but… well, a pretty website.

Back to keyword research, look down the list below, and you will see that there are 68 million searches for "homes for sale". Let’s put that into a search box.

You still generate lots of large numbers and hard keywords to get listed for. But let’s look down the list a little to "Florida homes for sale". Now we are getting somewhere, even though the real estate agent lives in Indiana. Why? Because it proves that people search by location. With a little more research, you’ll see that most product searches have a local component to them.

Now lets put in "Indiana homes for sale" and see what we get.

Look at all those people searching by location with Fort Wayne as the top ranking city. But why stop there? Let’s go back and look at the other two and see what other terms people could be searching. Here’s a short list:

Fort Wayne Indiana homes for sale
fort wayne homes for sale
foreclosed homes for sale in Fort Wayne
fort wayne new homes for sale
fort wayne lake homes for sale
green homes for sale in Fort Wayne
property for sale in Fort Wayne
commercial property for sale Fort Wayne
Fort Wayne investment properties for sale

Once we have a short list, let’s add some modifiers. These are somewhat dependent on your product, but some are universal, like:

Who
what
when
why
fix
cheap
free
product
review
picture
video
how
for
near

Now add location to the list.

city
town
area
zip code
attraction
schools
misspelling of the above


By combining a couple of those for our real estate agent, you would get:

Pictures of new homes in fort wayne
Real estate agent reviews for fort wayne
Apartments IPFW
46801 house for sale

Tools

Here’s a nice tool for location modifers, as well as some advice on keyword modifiers and some more. That is the short version of keyword research. There are, however, some more posts on the subject.

Holistic Keyword Research is a a great overview on using all the tools at your disposal. How to Create a Huge Keyword List is actually a guide on how to make focused list Short vs. Long Tail Keywords.

Google insights for search is a great way to find what is going to be hot in your section of the country.
Google sets Give it a few terms of similar interest and see what else it comes up with.
Google news Do a search for your keyword, and sign up for daily emails.
Google trends Whats hot?

Microsoft, trying not to be outdone by Google, now gives us adCenter labs. It is actually a set of four tools that give some interesting results.

xrank Similar to Google trend but with more current info.

Buzz Index from Yahoo

Quintura A fun way see how words are associated

Ebay pulse See whats hot on ebay

Wordtracker has been in the keyword research business for along time and has a free keyword tool

Got question or comments? Would like to hear from you.