There are two sides to everything, a good side and a bad side. The same rule applies to SEO keyword research. Well, doing keyword research is one of the most important aspects of optimization, but it breaks down into two parts. The first part is SEO keyword research before you build a site; this is the research on which you will base your site upon. The other part is keyword research once your website gets some momentum and some traffic; this is where you decide if you are going for the first price or the ever comforting silver medal.

SEO Keyword Research Before You Buy the Domain

Conducting keyword research before you buy your domain name is very important, as having your most important keyword in the domain URL is a great ranking factor. So what do we look for here, we are not looking for a low competitive keyword that is for sure, but we are not looking for a single word either. Out goal is to find a two to three word phrase which has a search volume that is satisfying to our needs. This is the easy part, the hard part is getting a base of keywords to build your site on, and for that you will use your main keyword.

The main keyword can have numerous variations, but don’t just use Google Keyword Tool or paid keyword tools to find synonyms and LSI keywords, use Thesaurus as well, this is the greatest keyword tool ever invented. What you need to do is create a list of keywords for your website that you will later narrow on your categories. My suggestion is to create a list of at least 100 keywords with at least 1,000 exact searches per month. If you can find that much it will be no trouble to create the main keyword on which you will base your website.

SEO Keyword Research 6 Months Later

After the first 6 months it is time to evaluate your SEO efforts and tweak your SEO campaign. In order to do that you need to reevaluate your keywords and maybe even discover some new ones. There is no need to use keyword tools here, the only tool you will need for this is Google Webmaster Tool.

All of the info about search queries and the amount of traffic that each of them gets will be available for you in your webmaster tools. What you need to do is find the keywords that are getting you the most traffic and build links using those keywords. Also identify potential rankers, keywords that are bringing you traffic without you optimizing for them. These keywords are the gold mine of your SEO effort. You didn’t waste time in optimizing your website for them but yet you manage to get some traffic of them. With some work and a bit of inbound links you may be able to get a good rank and increase traffic from those keywords.

You will be able to identify which keywords to work on and you will also be able to find new keywords, all of that by using your own search history as your keyword research tool. After that you can repeat the SEO plan measurement and tweaking every 3 to 6 months and you can achieve success.