Good planning and a systematic approach will allow you to get the best results from your keyword research. It is very important first to fulfill this criteria rather than jumping on to hosting or designing your site. Take the time to think it through and understand exactly what you're trying to achieve before you start work. People who think about keyword research before jumping in are much more likely to spot and exploit major opportunities.

Organizing your Keyword Research

Why do we need to conduct keyword research? Can't you just publish useful content? Won't people find it anyway?

If you simply guess at what people are looking for, you take the very real risk that you'll be wrong. Why take that risk when keyword research can give you such tremendous insight into what people are really looking for?

What the site developers often overlook is the fact that they never look from the customer’s or visitor’s point of view. To perform keyword research properly you must put yourself into your customer's shoes. If you do your research properly, not only will you be able to optimize your existing web site content, but you'll also be able to tap into an endless stream of ideas for new content that you know people will be interested in. You may even uncover valuable niche markets for your existing products as well as some smart ideas for new products.

The aim of keyword research is to help you make more money from the content you've got at the moment, and lay the foundations for creating even greater profits in the future.

So what's the basic approach you should take for a keyword research project? Let us see the approach for this concept.

Step 1: Start with a Good List of Seed Keywords

Seed keywords are the words you use to start a keyword research project. In themselves, they're not very useful, but the directions they take you in can produce a rich source of money-making keywords.

Suppose we are researching keywords for an information site on the side effects of some dreaded disease like cancer. The words like ‘Chemotherapy’, ‘Radiation’, ‘WBC count’, etc might be a promising seed keyword, because they would lead us to  disease of ‘Cancer’ or ‘Malignancy’.

The greater the number of promising seed keywords you have at the start of a project, the more comprehensive your final results will be.

Jotting down notes will get you started, but it won't give you anything near a full list of possibilities -- you'll need to do something to stimulate your creativity.

Get yourself secluded in a separate room and give some time to think about this keywords.

Read some magazines and articles about the disease and just note down the main points from the articles which are relevant to the disease. Than prepare a list of some words which you think could be the ideal keywords for your research.

Step 2: Find Related Keywords

We're obviously very proud of the service we can offer webmasters at Wordtracker,  because it provides two main types of keywords: 'related keywords' and 'long tail keywords.'

Related keywords are words that are often used in a particular subject area. For example, related keywords for 'back pain' would include 'sciatica', herniated disc, and 'spinal problems'; related keywords for 'home business' would include 'weekend entrepreneur' or 'working from home'.

Long tail keywords for 'back pain' would be 'back pain treatment,' 'lower back pain,' and 'exercise for back pain'; long tail keywords for 'home business' would include 'home business opportunities,' 'how to set up a home business,' or 'home business support. We'll take those seed keywords that we collected from the magazines and look for 'related keywords' for each in turn. You may be tempted to delve into detail, but you should resist this temptation for now. Find as many related concepts as possible -- you're not looking for the first right answer, but for many right answers.

If we are researching a web site on buying property overseas, we'll not only be interested in keywords such as 'homes abroad,' 'property abroad,' and 'international property' but also 'international mortgages,' ' global real estate,' 'property rights,' 'buying off plan,' 'health insurance abroad,' and 'expatriates.'

Always look for niche opportunities. Keyword research is one of the most effective ways to identify niche markets that others have failed to recognize.

This process should give you hundreds of related keywords. You can now test their popularity -- how often each word is searched for on average every day. These numbers, together with your own assessment of how important the keywords are for your business, allow you to prioritize your keyword lists.

Step 3: Map out Your Web Content Structure

You can use the keywords to map out the content of your site. Group them into themes -- for example, 'legal pitfalls' might be grouped with 'property rights' as part of a major section on the laws of buying and owning property overseas.

How you perform this grouping task is entirely up to you. You should aim to have groups that reflect your products and services and are targeted to specific target markets. Start with 6 to 10 themes, and then build on this later.

Step 4: Find Long Tail Keywords

Let us go into the details of this subject. The keywords you've grouped into themes are the starting point for digging into the long tail. Take each of the keywords you've researched in turn and analyze how they're used in longer search terms. For example, 'property abroad' is used in these longer search terms:

property for sale abroad

property abroad

investment property abroad

buying property abroad

mortgages to buy property abroad

mortgages second property abroad

residential property investments abroad

eco investment property abroad

resale property abroad

Next, look at the daily search counts to get an idea of the relevant importance of each term. Using this technique, you can very quickly build up a matrix of hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords.

Step 5: Create Your Detailed Content Plan

Now start looking for specific content ideas. I'll often go back to my original notes and follow this formula to create content ideas:

Hot issue + Popular keyword = Content Title

If, for example, you know that working with local estate agents and officials is a hot issue, you could combine this with the keyword 'homes abroad' to create the content title:

'Legal pitfalls in buying a home abroad'

Don't be afraid of highly competitive terms. Include them in your web site copy, even if you have no immediate chance of ranking well for them -- you're laying the foundations for the future.

Good keyword research helps map out a detailed content plan. This means that you won't waste time on irrelevant content, but will focus on highly relevant content ideas that will bring the traffic you're after.

Keyword Research Complete? Now that you've established your focus, you're ready to start creating your content. But your keyword research needs to be an ongoing process. Once you've published your pages, your need to monitor your performance, make adjustments accordingly, and then systematically expand the keywords that you rank well for. We shall discuss about this in details in our forthcoming articles.