I’ve been thinking today about the whole keyword research thing and I’ve been thinking about the fact that many people start it poorly and end it quickly because they don’t know how to do it, get bored quickly, or think there’s extreme rocket science in it. While the rocket science is true when you’re dealing with ads and have to do a lot of excel functions (now lessened by this microsoft excel add-in) it’s easier than you think to do basic keyword research.

Ok. let’s start with the very beginning. How do you find your main keywords? Well, that’s pretty much easy peasy, you choose your field of activity, your products, brands you own (you can get in trouble by optimizing your site for competitor brands) as well as anything you can think of that’s related to your products and services, but not necessarily sold by you. You now have your core keywords. What to do what to do?

Well, first things first, we check for synonyms. Great resource is, naturally, thesaurus.reference.com/, where you can easily search. Let’s say you sell pens, which is not an easy word to think up synonyms for. We search and get ball point, fountain pen, ink stick, marker, nib, pencil, quill, reed, stick, stylograph as well as light pen and its synonyms absolute pointing device, electronic stylus, light stylus. Now you may not be selling all of them, or be interested in them, but what an amazing way of generating new keywords…

Part two is to couple those words with geographic locations. For example, you may want to add city, county, general geographic region, a popular name or two, country and even continent (in some rare occasions). Why you want that is because many people will search once, find some results, then see the companies are from a totally different city and search again for their city, which also increases the conversion rate for them. So you get even more keywords but this time correlated more closely to you. The reason this works is because on the Internet people are looking for you, not the other way around, and they are genuinely pleased when they have found you…

Another nice trick which I feel is overlooked many times is to google search it with a wildcard. This will get you related terms to your query, and basically you will search for “pen *” OR “* pen” which gives you close matches. Also, through this you can get a sniff of the competition (even if they’re not direct) and see what their keywords are and get in on their hours of research. This works better in yahoo, where they actually give you this data through their “Search assist”, although it’s a bit rusty at times. To get the best results don’t forget to end your keywords with spaces (leave a space after even if it’s the last or only word) and also check this after you’ve searched (you get more results like that).

A little no-brainer is to remember to switch the word order of your keywords since people search strangely. They sometimes search for “taco food” and sometimes for “food taco” (since they first thought of food then what exactly). And if this is a bad example, let’s think of “red ball” and “ball red”; also, “seo in bucharest” and “bucharest seo”. For the last result althought the first ranking is the same, the next differ greatly. So try and take advantage of gaps like these in your competitor’s strategies.

This is it for the Beginner’s guide to keyword research, of course we as professionals use a lot more strategies but the basics are here. I’ll get into more depth and detail in a further post but it may be some time until that gets completed…

I say again, resubscribe to the RSS feed since the old one is dead and you seriously don’t want to miss out on the cool stuff coming up. Tomorrow: robots.txt