How to choose good SEO keywords for your niche.

Whenever you start a new website, the first thing to work on is your niche marketing. What niche your website will be about and what keywords will you use for your SEO?

When it comes to search engine optimization, choosing the right keywords is what will make or break your chances of success. So before you start any kind of investment, it's a good thing to do a bit of researches and analysis.

In terms of online marketing, what makes a good niche?

• Something in high demand.

• By definition something not too competitive.

Of course, although not a broad market, your niche should still be in sufficient demand for you to be able to monetize or work; or you may just be wasting your efforts. Once this is confirmed, your objective is to leverage on the supply/demand balance sheet.

You need to take several factors in consideration when choosing your keywords:

• The search volume. Like I say usually, less than 10,000 searches per month and your market may just be "too" niche to be able to monetize. Make sure that the niche you choose has this kind of search volume.

• The competition volume. How many pages does the search engines return? Clearly the higher the number the more difficult it will be for you to rank high for this search term. Look for keywords that returns about 2,000,000 at first. You'll always be able to tackle more competition later on as your authority increases.

• Your "Real" competition volume. Knowing that the most important element of on-page optimization is your Page Title. There's no doubt that anyone using the keyword in the Page Title will be likely to overpower those who don't. The simple fact that those sites uses this technique implies that they some knowledge about SEO themselves. Those are your real competitors.

So the first thing you should do is make some keyword research to build yourself a basic keyword list either using a paid keyword software, or using some free keyword tools such as "Wordtracker"

Let's pretend that we are interested in building a site about "nail art". In addition, for the sake of fairness, we'll use the free keyword suggestion tool from Wordtracker to do our research and analysis.

One excellent thing about this tool is that not only it will return the top 100 keywords and their daily search volume, you can also refine your search by clicking on any of those keywords to have sub-list of keywords and their results. Now, those sub-results are all keyword terms that use the root keyword in them, that's very powerful.

When you do that, not only you optimize your site for this specific niche keyword, but in addition -- at not more cost or word - you also optimize for the root keywords. This is great for when you'll want to tackle more competition, you won't have anything to change as everything is already set right.

I want to take this opportunity to stress that SEO starts before you build a website, and not after like so many people do.

By doing your SEO work first, you'll be able to build a ready optimized site, that'll go on with you forever maximizing your time and workload. By doing your SEO work after, you take the risk to have to rebuild your site over and over, to move it from place to place, from site to cms or blog... That's very counterproductive...

Ok, back to our search, when looking at the results on Wordtracker for "nail art" we found out that this niche returns 1,266 searches daily just for the top 100 keywords, that's about 40,000 per month. It seems that we are working in a viable niche.

Next, let's see what keywords are returned and their value:

• Nail art -- 416 daily searches

• Nail art designs -- 114 daily searches

• Hand painted nail art -- 98 daily searches

• Freehand nail art -- 45 daily searches

With only 45 searches "freehand nail art" is too low of a search volume to be usable. As beginners, it's not so wise to try to tackle the main niche term itself as the competition may be too stiff for us (6,660,000 competitors). Anyway, that keyword in included in the search terms of the second and third results.

We now have to chose between "nail art designs" and "hand painted nail art", considering that their search volume is fairly similar, I would go for "nail art designs" because it's a 3 words search terms which may be easier to use too.

So next, let's check the competition level of Google for this search term: 718,000 -- that's good news, we are looking for competition not exceeding 2,000,000 for a start where 1,000,000 is better. The good news for us is also to know that when we want to upgrade to "nail art" the competition increases a lot and so does the market share. It means that we are in an open market with room for expansion.

718,000 is still a lot of people to fight against, let's see what our real competition is. In the Google search box, type the following command: allintitle:nail art designs

This will tell Google to look for all the website who have the keyword "nail art designs" in their page title. The result is 6,000. Now that's more like it!

Here's a summary of what we now have and know about our keyword:

• Our niche has about 40,000 searches per month.

• Our keyword has about 3,500 searches per month.

• We only have to compete with 6,000 other websites instead of 6,600,000

• Evolution could lead to optimization for "nail art" and why not "nail" in the future...

Just by understanding and applying this information, you'll have an incredible advantage over your competition in your niche!

Remember, I'm here to help!