Webupon

1. Google Adwords Tool – Almost always your best first step.
2. WordTracker. Another great tool, though not nearly as exhaustive as google.
3. SEOBook has an amazing tool that give you a huge amount of tools to work with. It is almost a one stop keyword tool and definitely worth the time to look over.
4. Blogs and Forums- Visit blogs and forums by searching in google “blog + niche” or “forum + niche”. It’s a great way to get inside your target audience’s head and figure out what they need/want and also can be a great way to research content.

KEYWORDS

So by now you should have a good broad list to go from. I like lists of at least 200 keywords. Out of that you should get at least 25 quality low-competition keywords to work with.

Using WordTracker or SEOBook Keyword tool, try and narrow your list down to keywords getting a daily search that is decent. If your keyword has 300 or more daily searches, it probably has some stiff competition… I like to stay around 100 searches per day. Though if you are brand new to the business, 50 per day will be much easier for you to dominate. That means you only need 7 quality keywords to be dominating 10,000 searches per month!

As for the best way to check out your competition… It’s easier than you think! Just to do a simple search. Use: allintitle:”keyword” in the google search bar to find out. This search will yield specific results that will show you your TRUE competition…. not just who used the keyword in their content. I never use keywords that have more than 50,000 websites as competition… Again, if you’re starting out… cut that number in half.

Remember earlier when I said that you needed to check out your competition? Well this is the perfect opportunity to do so…. If your “allintitle” search revealed that the first few pages are full of high PR sites, just walk away. If the search is filled with less than PR3 sites, dominate away!

The trick to keywords is really just making it easy for you in the long run. Once you’ve got the experience under your belt you can start going for the more competitive niches and scale your operation up