Keyword Research

After you have identified a list of potential niches (see the Finding Niches section) you need to do some keyword research to see whether or not they could be profitable or not. You will want to find keywords that have a lot of demand, ie many searches every month, and have low supply, ie few sites come up when you search for that keyword.

The first place I would recommend you visit is the Yahoo search marketing site. This will give you a few useful tools that will allow you to enter a keyword and find out how many times that word was searched for in the previous month on Yahoo, plus a number of alternative keywords you could use. Note you would expect the number of Google searches to be at least double those of Yahoo. You can also check to see what price advertisers are paying to get top placements in their sponsored search section, their equivalent of Google Adwords.

This is a good foundation and will tell you how many people, if any, are actually searching for any given keyword. However, you now need to see if this keyword has many competing sites, to find out how easy it will be to get good rankings. You can do this yourself manually by going to either Yahoo or Google and typing in the keyword. It will then come back to you with the number of results. Dividing this figure by the number of searches will give you an indication of how much competition there is. You want to find keywords where this figure is as low as possible.

One other thing, you should now look at the first page of results you see on Google when you enter a keyword. If most of them have a pagerank (this is a measure of how many links from other sites a site has - to check this download the free Google toolbar) of 5 or above, then it's probably not best to target this keyword, as they're clearly an established site with numerous incoming links. This is discussed in depth elsewhere on this site.

This is a very laborious task, and as time is a very precious commodity, I would recommend using one of the numerous keyword tools on the market. There are a number of free ones like goodkeywords, but the one I use for all my sites, and can thoroughly recommend is KeywordsAnalyzer.

This is an extremely powerful piece of software. It basically does all the things mentioned above in a fraction of the time, and offers so many other advanced features. Just enter any keyword, and it will instantly give you all the information you need such as number of searches per month, number of competing websites, and the ratio of supply/demand. Plus if you are interested in advertising with say Google Adwords or Yahoo's network, it will tell you instantly how many ad campaigns are currently running for that particular keyword, plus what the current highest bids are, so you know what you will have to pay to get top advertising spots. This is also useful information if you are carrying Google Adsense on your site, as you will get a nice percentage of this bid price.

There are so many other features that I could mention. For example you could enter a simple keyword, and the software will within just a few minutes come back with literally thousands of related keywords you could use, and their relative competition. My best advice would be to click here to visit the KeywordsAnalyzer website, read the sales letter, and watch the short demonstration video. This will demonstrate how powerful this software really is. 

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