This post belongs to the SEO series started earlier, you can find previous post at here, SEO 101: Intro & Basics. as for today, we’ll have a look in keyword research in SEO.

It’s not a new thing when it comes to SE keyword research and i’m sure most people who read my blog should have know a bit of how and where to run a basic keyword research on the Internet. I had cover the subject not long ago on this blog (the post is gone now due to bad hosting service and i didnt backup my blog properly).

To make this post (and the following post on competition analysis) valuable to you, i’ll make a quick one on the general part and provide more practical examples and working tools online.

Keyword Research: What it is?

A keyword research is more or less like a study on the supply-demand trends online. you’ll need to lookup on the supply (how many websites are there offering the product/service); and compare it with the size of market, aka demand (how many are there looking for the product/service). It’s one of the basic preperation you can do in the initial stage of your SEO campaign or upon website launching. it acts like a compas to your online biz, giving general idea which keywords/keyphrases you should focus on.

Besides, keyword research helps when you ran out of idea in starting a new biz online… it generally tells you the trends online and what’s hype online.

How to do a keyword reseach?

As said, keyword research takes demand and supply as its inputs. supply - how many websites are there; demand - how many users are searching on the keywords.

The supply
Looking for the figures of supply? go search online. statistics tell us that google roughly handles more than 50% of the search online, followed by Yahoo!, AskJeeves, MSN, DogPile, Excite, and other search engines. search your keyphrases on these SE and look up how many results return on the SERP - that’s the rough figure for your supply. pretty simple.

The demand
For the demand (how much searches are there) input, the easiest way is to check out overture or wordtracker on digital point keyword suggestion tools. if you need related keyword ideas, Google’s keyword tools would be another fine (and free!) tools to be used.

Personally, i like to use digital point keyword suggestion tool in this part as it provides the data from both overture and wordtracker and it’s free! you can try it out here:

Better tools for keyword suggestion

A disadvantage of using this free keyword suggestion tools is that the results displayed from these statisctic data reflects the search trends of certain SE. overture’s data for example shows searches in Yahoo! and its search network; Word Tracker free trial, if not mistaken, only provides search data for Alta Vista (which is more or less useless nowadays). the result doesn’t cover Google or MSN or other SE not in its list of support. the numbers you got might be biased due to different SE users base (for example more technical terms are searched on Google according to studies).

Thus, if you are getting really serious in knowing your potential customers (aka, search traffics), it would be wise to advise that you should lookup for more data from different search platforms. If you need data into that extend, i would suggest Wordtracker paid services where you can get search data from all major SE plus a number of keyword analysis functions.

You can click here to visit Word Tracker’s subscription page.

Real life application

You’ve learned how and where to run your own keyword research, but where to use the technique is another story. here’s some situation where you can link up keyword research as your solution.

Website structure design
Say that i am looking for new website ideas and came up with idea of selling shoes. i might have questions like: how the shoes in my website should be categorized (when dealing with the website structure)? what are the popular brands searched online? so we run a quick keyword research on the word ’shoes’.

You’ll see searchers are generally looking for a particular brand when searching for shoes: payless shoes, jordan shoes, nike shoes, dc shoes - this answers the brand questions. people are also looking for shoes for different occasions: ballet shoes, platform shoes, prom shoes, bowling shoes, and such - so, if you would like to categorized the shoes available on your website, you can sort it accordingly.

Checking demands on a niche
Not everything can sell online. take example of John, a catamaran seller. he wants to know whether it’s wise for him to promote his product online or not… the least he can do is to run a basic check on search volumes of catamaran and found the results as below:

Okay, seems like catamarans are not as popular as shoes online. looking on the WT side, the phrase ‘catamarans for rent’ comes top, yields about 80 searches per day; ‘catamarans sailing’ about 70, ‘waikiki catamaran cruises’ 65, and ‘catamaran for sale’ 59. from the numbers, we knew more searchers are looking for catamaran renting than buying one (common sense?). nevertheless, the number of catamaran related searches are very little and setting up an online catamaran stores probably have little or no effects to John’s business.

Improving your website by solving user’s needs
Moving on, say that you are the webmaster of your local bank mortgage website. you wish to do more for your customer but not knowing what your customer want. for this, you can either set up a feedback form to hear from your customers, or you can hit up on the keyword research and see what searchers are looking for when it comes to mortgage.

You’ll then see people are concern about the mortgage rate and are frequently looking for a mortgage calculator (probably for reviewing the loan plans). seeing so, you know what to add up on your website if you haven’t got one mortgage calculator.

Initiating your competition analysis
Also, keyword research is to help you in starting off the competition analysis in certain business. in fact, this is always the main purpose of keyword research for most webmasters/affiliates - to check on the competition and to decide whether it’s worth getting into a biz or not. however, i’ll leave this to the next session of SEO 101 where we will take a look on the competition analysis.

I’ll stop at this point for keyword research. till then, happy SEO-ing. we’ll look into competition and market analysis on our next session.