When you research keywords to use in your web site or blog, it’s important to find words that people really search for, while avoiding keywords that you cannot realistically compete for. Here are some suggestions on how to research keywords more effectively and efficiently.

1. Create a list of potential keywords and phrases related to the subject of your web site. Try using a thesaurus to obtain more related keywords you might find desirable. The keyword research tools referred to in the next step are also useful for finding related keywords. Some sites effectively obtain traffic by creating content centered around commonly misspelled words.

2. Research how many people are searching for these keywords. You can use Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and various other keyword research tools to easily and effectively obtain this sort of data. Some of these tools are free, others require a subscription fee. If no one is looking for a particular word or phrase on the search engines and you don’t have any reason to believe that will change, it probably isn’t worth producing content on that subject.

3. Use a major search engine to query keywords you are interested in; if all of the first and second page results are supplied by major (high PageRank) web sites, your site will have difficulty surpassing them in this subject (unless the site is already very well known). It is a good sign if there are few results or most listings aren’t specific to the keyword of interest; you may be able to effectively serve this niche.

4. Keep in mind that your goal (probably) isn’t just to increase hits to the web site; you want to effectively attract interested visitors who will click advertisements, purchase products, or otherwise benefit the site. For example, if a laser printer dealer were to go to the effort of attaining high rankings for words like “printer” and “printing”, it would needlessly attract many users who are only interested in other types of printers (also wasting bandwidth).

Unfortunately, no matter how effectively you research keywords, not all of them will produce a lot of traffic. Search query data isn’t always accurate, the things people are interested in vary from time to time, and new competitors may appear. Generally, the best strategy is to target niche keyword phrases which specifically relate to your site’s content and aren’t overly competitive.

Related posts:

1. Why is Keyword Research Critical To SEO?
2. What is KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index)?