Ideas for a website topic - Keyword research tools

So you have a topic? Great! You're sure it's going to be a winner? Super great! Will anyone actually find this website on this super great topic unless you wisely choose your keywords? Nope! Sorry, but you can't start building yet.

Before you sigh at me in frustration, let me ask you this: what is the most common way that you find information online? You type words into a search engine. The search engine doesn't know what you want to find because it has a human brain that understands your thoughts, it is a piece of technology that follows the rules of a mathematical algorithm that bases your results on the specific words that you used. It is a tool. Finding the right words or combinations of words that will make this tool display your website in its results as much as possible is one of the most important things that you can do for your website. What's the point of building a great website that nobody sees?

To begin, think of words that you would use to search for information that your website will provide. Type those words into Google. Let's say your site is on snowboarding. To type 'snowboarding' into Google would bring forth over 16 MILLION results. These are all competing websites.

Yikes! But if you choose a longer, more targeted phrase, such as snowboarding jackets, there is only about 304,000 results. So you see that the more targeted your keywords are, the less competition your word will have, and the easier it will be to rise up through the Google ranks to a prized position on page 1.

There are other factors that are more advanced, but to begin with, just focus on these two. Your aim is to find a keyword phrase relating to your website that is searched often but has the smallest amount of competition.

There are dozens of ways to do this that I won't go into here because I will be writing for hours. I'll just tell you what works for me. I use a combination of two products: Micro Niche Finder and Market Samurai. These are programs that you download into your computer and they do all of the hard work for you, saving you hours and hours of time. They are both paid products, but I find them invaluable investments when it comes to getting my websites and articles to rank well.

Micro Niche Finder is the tool I use when first beginning keyword research. I just type in the term I want to explore and bang! there are 300 similar search terms that micronichefinder has thoughtfully pulled up off the internet for me. From then on it is only the click of a few buttons and I have search volume, number of competing websites, adwords value, and more for each keyword phrase. The final column in Micro Niche Finder is my favourite - the SOC or Strength of Competition column. It will assess factors such as number of backlinks to each site and give you a red, yellow or green light to indicate whether this keyword phrase is a good one or not.

I love these little lights as they are an easy and quick and easy way for me to assess the viability of any particular market I'm researching. Let's face it, human beings respond to visual stimuli and who wants to look at a bunch of statistics for hours? But don't be fooled at this friendly little part of the program, Micro Niche Finder is powerful and adaptable software that enables very easy one click drilling down and analysis of your keywords.

The second tool I use for my research is Market Samurai. Once I have a good amount of keywords that have good search volume and a green light from Micro Niche Finder, I open up Market Samurai and look at the competition values of these keyword phrases. After typing in my keyword phrase into Market Samurai, I click on the Keyword Research tab. Don't be scared by all of the phrases and factors that you can analyse on this page - it scared me to begin with too. The good news for beginners is that this page is already structured according to the preset 'golden rules' which are the general factors that will indicate whether this keyword is within the set of parameters that resesarch has proven are the best for beginning a new website. Upon clicking 'analyse keywords' I am left with a set of filtered results which are all recommended by Market Samurai.

The next tab down - SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Competition - is the final step in my keyword research. This page lets me see what the top 10 competitiors in Google currently have going for them - their number of backlinks, their on page optimisation, etc (we will get to this later). All you need to know right now is that the more green spaces in the series of columns that appear the better. Similar to Micro Niche Finder, Market Samurai codes red, yellow and green to guide you to the best way to proceed.

Basically, the websites with the most green squares beside it are the weaker websites, websites which we can beat for the top positions if we take care to address factors in our webpages that they have not. My rule of thumb here is to look for two websites here that are weak enough (have a lot of green beside them) for me to beat.

Some people who don't complete this part of their keyword research are faced with the heartbreaking, gut churning reality of spending hours of their time building a website, only to find around their chosen keywords, only to find that the websites they are competing against for the first page of Google are well established monsters, big players in your website's area that have marketing budgets the size of a small island. The price of Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder is tiny compared to the hours of your life spent on a lost cause such as this!

Market Samurai even offers a free trial, for you to try out the program and see just how good it is. Click here to download it now!

Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder are the most popular keyword research tools on the market, but they're not the only ones. I've compiled a list of other keyword research tools that internet marketers use for you to have a look at.