Posted on February 01, 2009 by Brett

So you have got a domain and you are starting to try to research your industry that you want to go into.  Now just because you think you know your industry doesn’t mean you know it how others think.  Being in an industry can really distort your visions of what keywords people are using when searching for your product or service.  First things first, you must do your keyword research.  If you don’t get any other thing right when it comes to internet marketing, GET KEYWORD RESEARCH RIGHT!  If you don’t do this correctly you have the chance of never getting any traffic at all to your site.  Or God forbid spending money on PPC to either not get any traffic or get traffic that you don’t want.

There are a number of places to get keywords and do research on keywords.  There is the all famous Google Keyword External Tool.  This tool is pretty straight forward and easy to use.  It is the tool that a lot of people use when trying to set up an AdWords Campaign.  I like it a lot.  It is where I start first when I am researching keywords, but isn’t the only place to go.  The Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool is good too.  I would suggest going there after using google’s keyword tool.  Then there are numerous of other ways to find keywords.  There is my favorite as of now the tools.seobooks keyword tool.  This one is great for finding out information on all types of different sites.  It is also great for finding niches that you might not have thought of.  For example, start with a broad keyword such as “shoe” and then just keep honing down.  You will find niches that you never thought would have search volume but surpisingly have a lot of searches per day.

The best thing to is keep researching keywords to come up with different lists that can be broken down into different categories to make your website a lot more robust.  Examples might be 1. SEO then on that page have links to factors of SEO such as, contextual linking or H1 tags.  Instead of trying to get keywords for just the sake of having keywords, learn how they all relate to one another and try to find the heiarchy so that you can keep adding content as you go along.  A lot of times (especially using tools.seobooks) I will find great things to write articles about.  I also find great things to find stuff to write about on Answer sites.  This is a great resource for keywords as a lot of times the people asking the questions are actually in the niche and know some of the lingo.

The amount of places to find keywords are more than you can imagine.  So what you have to do is get creative.  If you lack a lot of creativity then hang around the forums on your topic or use Google sets to find other keywords or similar industries.  Also try The eBay Pulse.  You can find hot items there to do research on.

I will have more on keyword research but this should get you started and give you enough to get your feet wet.  The main thing with doing all this Internet marketing jive is to try to not get overwhelmed.  The amount of information and different tactics that you can use are vast and trying to take it all in at one time is daunting and will lead to failure.  Focus on this list of sites for now and when you master using these, come back and I should have some other areas where you can find keywords.