Keyword Research - How to Find Keywords With the Most Traffic and the Least Competition?

Keyword research is something you're going to have to pay attention to, if you want to have more than a few occasional wins with your internet marketing .

Ideally you want to be able to find keywords and key phrases that meet 3 criteria. These are--

SUBSTANTIAL TRAFFIC. If you find some obscure expression that only 22 people search for, you might not make a brilliant income from that market niche.

MINIMAL COMPETITION. You don't want to be competing against hordes of other advertisers and marketers.

Few competitors = a brilliant keyword.
Tons of competitors = a lousy keyword.

BUYERS SPEND MONEY. Tons of people search for 'free' stuff everyday. But they are not your ideal customers.

Okay, so now we have a broad description of what a "good looking" keyphrase looks like, the next obvious question is...

How do you find these marvelous keywords? - because once you know that, you can find your ideal prospects.

Here's how you research to find profitable keywords:

Step 1 -- investigate TRAFFIC volumes.

Go to freekeywords.wordtracker.com or any other similar site and type in a broad term such as golf. The site will give you a list of the top 100 search results for that word. Under golf, for example, you will find golf clubs, golf carts, golf buggies, etc. I'm sure you get the idea.

Next to each phrase you will see the number of daily searches.

From that list, select the results that have enough searches to be worth your while to target. Copy from Wordtracker to a spreadsheet. You want both keyphrases and search volume. You can get a very good spreadsheet program from OpenOffice for no cost.

Step 2 -- investigate the amount of COMPETITION.

Go to Google.com and type in each of these potential keyphrases and make a note of how many competing sites there are in that market. See the number of results near the top right of your Google results page? - yes, that's the number. For each keyphrase, copy it into a new column on your spreadsheet.

Step 3 -- check if there's MONEY in this niche.

Also make a new column for how many paid Google ads appear for each keyphrase you are investigating. If there aren't any ads, this is not a niche worth targeting.