This post is the second part of my post related to keyword research, you can read the first post here at: Keyword Research: Follow the Right Path

When it comes to keyword research and selection, there are numerous points which should always be kept in mind during the process because keyword research is the most important part of developing an online business and choosing wrong keywords might ruin all your efforts. So always invest reasonable amount of time for finding the right keywords to start with. 

Long Tail Vs Short Tail Keywords:

Short tail keywords are those keywords, which represent a niche (If you are new to internet marketing, read as “market” for the sake of simplicity). While long tails are those which specify a little deeper in the concerned niche or market. For an example, if we talk about digital camera niche then keyword like “Digital camera” is a broad keyword (read as short tail) and “Kodak digital camera 9 MP” or “Cannon digital camera DX665” are long tail keywords.

Hope you got it.

If we consider commerciability in our research there are two types of keywords.

1. Research Keywords
2. Buying keywords or Money Keywords

For an example, if someone is searching for “digital camera”, might be the surfer is doing some research on digital cameras and not in buying mood, so the probability of sales is low, on the other hand if someone searches for “Cannon digital camera 9 MP DXS-635”, as we can see, this search is for a particular product and the probability of sale is much higher than the previous one. So knowing about right keywords is must because optimizing or doing PPC for wrong keywords will not return anything. Keeping track of your campaigns is also necessary both for SEO and PPC.

But this doesn’t conclude that one should not target broad keywords. Actually the whole game depends upon the budget and goals. If you have a handsome budget you can easily go for keywords like “credit cards”, but if you do not have much to spend , start with long tails(like “HSBC bank credit card London”) and then as time passes , invest more to gain results for short tails

Wide Vs Deep Keywords

Wide keywords refer to all the keywords related to a niche just like, if we talk about “dog training”, keywords like:

dogs training
dog training course
dog obedience training
dog training courses
dog training schools
dog training classes
dog training equipment
dog training class
dog training information
dog training collars
dog training collar
dog agility training

are called as wide keywords as it specifies the keywords related to dog training..

Now for finding deep keywords we need to do some brainstorming. Not only in dog training niche, this is true for all niches, just find different characteristics of the situation or problem. For our dog training example, just try to find out the problems your dog has for which you want to get it trained.

Some common problems are biting, excessive jumping and barking, digging. Apart from this we can also find out different dog breeds like Doberman, Alsatian, German shepherd, pug etc and then prepare our deep keyword list.

Stop dog digging
Stop dog jumping
Stop dog biting
Stop my dog from biting

————————————

Stop Doberman from digging
Stop German shepherd from biting

————————————

German shepherd agility training
Doberman obedience training

————————————

And many more.

Are Keyword Tools Helpful?

The answer is YES and NO. They are indeed helpful if you really know how to use them properly and extract the most from it. If you don’t know to use them properly, you might end up with a wrong keyword list. In my opinion Google keyword research tool and search based keyword tool are best. In addition you can also use Traffic Travis (It has both free and paid versions, but free version is capable enough to extract optimum results).

OK OK I got it all, now tell me, Where to start?

Good now you are ready to find your keywords and start your online business.

Ok I am just opening Google keyword tool, I have extracted my keywords…..

Hey Wait… Again you are missing something…

Before you start your keyword research with Keyword Tool External, Traffic Travis or some other tool, I have a suggestion for you.

Visit different forums and blogs in your niche and try to find out what people are talking and searching about and what are the basic problems of the audience you are going to face and attend ?. I think you got the point.

Always keep in mind if you have the solution of a problem and if you can present it to your niche properly then you are going to sustain in the business. So just spy your market and try to find out the problems and the solutions available and then decide to do things in a different way and you will be the boss of the niche.

Using Forums and Yahoo Answers

Just fireup Google and type “your main keyword” forums.

Like “dog training” forums

You now have a list of several forums, just enter them and try to find out the topics which the members are talking about and in this way you will have an idea of the problems related to the niche. After you have noted down all these things, you are ready to prepare your keyword list.

There is one more effective way, use Yahoo Answers. This is a very good platform to know about your niche. I myself use Yahoo Answers extensively for finding keywords for niche I wish to enter and know nothing about.

Using Google Wonder wheel and suggest for finding right keywords

You might have noticed Google’s new tool, wonderwheel. It’s a very good tool for conducting keyword research and SILOING. I would try to post about silo, its effect on SEO and how to SILO a website in coming days. Google is doing a very good job by providing more effective tools for us webmasters. You now have options to search forums, images, timeline which relates to trends (they provide timeline data from 1800 AD, I do not know whether Larry Page or Sergey Brin were there back in 1800 AD   ), shopping results , videos etc at one place.

In my opinion this is the right process from doing keyword research to finally establishing a successful online business

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What is KW research?

First of all, the question arises “what are keywords?” especially for a newbie in the Internet marketing field. In short, keywords and key phrases are those words which a user types in any search engine, as a query for the purpose of finding any information or product.

Like if anyone want to have the information related to dog training. He visits any search engine (Google for example) and types “dog training”

Google in turn returns links to different web resources (typically websites) as results (paid and organic results, we will discuss about these later).

So keywords are a word or phrase which are used to seek information.

Now point comes to keyword research. Keyword research is the process of finding keywords which are used in a particular niche for finding information and products. Let us take an example, suppose I want to launch a new website in dog training niche, so the aim of my keyword research will be, to find different keywords which are used by the information and product seekers in this particular niche, and to determine the volume of traffic the niche is receiving.

How do Google know about all these (They are a great spy! )

Difference between keyword research and market research

Keyword research designates to the traffic volume and different keywords used in a niche, as I tried to explain above. Market research is more or less geographic oriented and depends on the psychological behavior of the users in a particular arena.

Confused…?

Let us understand this with an example. If we talk about online jewelry market (also other physical goods) in Unites States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, it’s a very profitable market. People in these countries do purchase from online jewelry stores, and online jewelry sale is a multi billion dollar market in these countries. Contrary if we talk about Bangladesh, India or China, people prefer to buy jewelry from physical stores and online jewelry sales are next to zero. This is related to many psychological factors like they do not believe much on online stores, they want to see and feel the final product they are going to spend money on, they have much spare time as compared to a person in United States.

So market research is basically a research about the market which someone intends to enter, keeping all the geographical and behavioral factors in mind.

When it comes to keyword research there are many factors which come in mind like short tail and long tail keywords, wide keyword list and deep keyword list, how to use Yahoo Answers, Answer Bag and niche related forums to do keyword research, traffic keywords and money keywords( keyword goldmine), I will be covering all these topics in coming posts. So keep reading…

Keyword research tools you must have in your arsenal…

1. Adwords keyword tool external ( Famously known as Google keyword tool)
2. Google search based keyword tool
3.  Google Trends
4. Traffic Travis ( tool from Mark Ling, and its free)
5. MSN Commercial intent tool

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