Keyword Research 101

OK, I just got done watching a video on keyword research from a very popular and liked internet marketing company and wow I was a bit shocked.  Jeeez they spent 10 minutes going over if its better to phrase your search on a singular or a plural version of a word, for example "buy microwave" vs. "buy microwaves".

First of all, if its that big of a deal, why not just focus on both terms?  If you don’t have a site with enough juice to pull it off then throw up a minisite or a subsite somewhere and just get a few backlinks for the second term.  Its not that hard.

Second of all, isn’t this stuff that should be taught in like Keyword Research 101?  Anyone who can go to google and type in "keyword research" will find very many tools that mixed with common sense should suffice quite well.

In case your to lazy to go and actually sift through a few entries on that google page, than just use Keyword Discovery’s free tool.  I have been using this for ages and that free tool is all I need for my keyword research many of the times.  From what I hear, if you take the results from Keyword Discovery and take it times three, that will be a much more accurate number of the amount of searches.

Now when I want to dig a little bit deeper to understand the traffic patterns of certain keywords I will many times use Wordtracker’s GTrends Tool.  You can get an idea on the amount of competition on Google compared to the amount of searches.  Now these numbers are far from accurate, BUTTT if you can kind of step back and take a broader look at things, don’t worry so much about the numbers but compare the trends since it shows the past history.  See if its steady traffic, traffic that is going extinct, or traffic just starting to peak.  By using this tool, you can many times find some golden opportunities.

It really comes down to just using common sense.  Just sit down and think… What would other people search to find this?  What would I search for to find this?  Try phrases in your keyword research tool to get new ideas and find the higher trafficked most targeted phrases.  DO NOT look at the numbers spat back out at you by these programs as accurate numbers, they rarely ever are.  But like I said you can still use these tools to get ideas on new keywords, search patterns of users, and many other things, that mixed with the information of trends in that area, can really help a guy out

There are tons of other Keyword Research tools, some are pretty good, some are complete junk.  Feel free to comment and let me know which tools you are using and why it is you choose it over others.