Much is written about Search Engine Marketing, and all the good advice will start with something about doing your keyword research BEFORE you start to build a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign or to Optimise (SEO) your site so that the Engines like what they find. By the way, from my point of view, no one should even build a site without doing thorough keyword research, but that is another issue (I'll put the soap box away).
So if Keyword Research is so important, how does one go about it. As with all aspects of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) there are as many answers as there are people to ask in the first place, but one method is mentioned by many, and that is to use Wordtracker.
Wordtracker will not, as some might tell you, provide all the search queries used by everyone for anything, in fact, Wordtracker sees a tiny percentage of the searches made every day, but it, and it is a big but, does keep a database of somewhere near 380million searches, and that makes the data both valuable and statistically viable. Better still due to the sources used, these searches are not polluted by search engine optimisation companies who are typing in keywords to see where the sites they are optimising are in the listings (these are not "true" searches as they just distort what is really being searched for and are thus best avoided).
Carefully (and painstakingly used, it can take 16 hours to do keyword research properly), Wordtracker will provide you with a host of information about what sort of terms people are using, how often, plus it will give you an idea of the competition, and thus using the two, an idea of which ones are worth more effort than others.
Once you have the report however, you are not nearly finished, you still have to apply a fair amount of grey matter to the data to work out how to use it and which variations of the keywords you have found to use, but it does provide you with a firm foundation on which to build your online marketing campaign.
There are other resources too, the Google PPC interface also providing some data on what keywords are being used, plus of course, there are other keyword research engines like, Keyword Discovery and Best Keywords, so as with many things in life, you have to make your choice...
For more information on online marketing, please see our main site at www.intelligent-online-marketing.com
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