Keywords are nothing more than the words or phrases that people use to find your website on the net.
Niche Keyword research is the first step in deciding which target niche to focus on. Keyword research consists of finding targeted keyword phrases related to your niche, analyzing the competition and commercialization of your selected keywords.
As a reminder before you get started, remember to select a niche that you are interested in or passionate about. This will make building the niche that much more enjoyable and increase your chances of success. Also you should always only focus on a single niche at a time or at least fully develop the niche site before starting on your next project.
Start your keyword research off by first brainstorming on topics that you are interested in or ones that you think could be profitable. After you have your list of 5 to 10 topics, go through and rank them based on your favorites. Now start at the top and do your keyword research until you find a niche that you feel you can rank for and earn some income from. Remember to save your list for when you are ready to start your next niche.
Keyword Tools
When it comes time to do keyword research there are lot of tools available on the web today. The most popular being Google's Keyword Tool. There are also free trials from the popular paid sites like Trellian's Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker Keywords.
One of the best desktop applications that I have found is Market Samurai. If you haven't seen or heard of Market Samurai before you should download their free trial and give it a spin. You can also check out my video to see how I use it to do my keyword research.
If you don't use a tool like Market Samurai, you'll want to make sure that you still do a thorough job in researching your keyword competition and commercialization before deciding on a niche. Google's free keyword tool and traffic estimator can help, but I recommend you use one or two other free tools on the web to verify your findings.
This is the list of keywork tool
1. Market samurai ($147)
2. Ubersuggest (This is great for me recommend free)
3. Google's Keyword Tool ( free)
Selecting Your Keyword Phrases
I like to start with a wide niche phrase and allow Market Samurai to suggest other popular terms and phrases. By starting with a general term, I'm letting Google and Market Samurai tell me what users are searching for and usually I find several search terms that I hadn't even thought of.
Market Samurai takes the list returned from Google's Keyword Tool and allows you to filter using positive and negative keywords. Then you can take that list of keywords and filter the results using data from Google's traffic estimator tool. I'm not even sure if you can do this via the free web tools on Google's site, but in Market Samurai it is very easy. By setting specific filters like search traffic, phrase-to-broad ratio, and several commercialization factors you can get a very clear picture of which words to focus on.
Checking the Competition
Once you have your list of 1 primary keyword phrase and 4 additional keyword phrases, you should research the page one results in Google to see if you will be able to out rank your competition. In the video, I show you how Market Samurai's SEO Competition module does this for you. If you don't have Market Samurai yet, don't worry all of the information can be pulled from Google using a variety of browser plugins and tools. If you would like to do it yourself, I recommend the SeoQuake SEO Extension for FireFox. It will display the PR value for each results plus it pulls backlink and domain information for each listing.
Determine Profitability
One last thing I like to do before I settle on a niche and keyword phrases, is to take a quick peek at what products are available to sell. Since our goal is to make money, we want to make sure that there are products to sell and buyers willing to make a purchase. I usually browse the related categories on ClickBank or Amazon for products that are converting well. I'll also spend a little bit of time looking for popular products that may be offered through other affiliate programs either directly or through someone like Commission Junction.
It's important not to spend a lot of time on this step as you can easily get bogged down in over analyzing niche keywords, competition and products. You want to make sure that the process doesn't stop you from taking action. If you are passionate about a topic and do a little bit of keyword research, chances are you will be able to make some money at it.
Good luck in your keyword research. Check out the links below for more videos on keyword research and setting up niche sites for profit.