When you’re starting you internet business it is essential to make a proper keyword research, because it is one of the major opportunity to promote products and services on internet using search engines. In any case if you would like your website to rank high among the competitors you should compose a high-quality keyword list. Let me remind you that keywords are the phrases you want to people find your website, product or services on the internet.

In this article I will explain how to:
1) which keywords are good and not good to go with
2) find cheap keywords, that will provide you reasonable conversion rate
3) find appropriate keywords
4) manage existing keywords
5) discard keywords
6) which tools paid and free are most reliable for the research

Before getting started, I want to make sure you understand the following important keyword concepts:

1. Market Necessity

To have the highest incomes you should go find the niche in demand, the niche people are interesting about and ready to pay money for the product or services you may provide. The more necessary the current market is the more people are willing to you for a solution to their questions and problems. How do you think what people are ready to pay for: how to train a home pet, or how to lose weight? You should find out how many people are searching for what you’re promoting.
There are lots of tools on the internet to measure traffic and demand for certain keywords. Later we will speak about the best tools to use for these purposes.

2. Low Competition

Do not confuse the item 1 and this one. Of course if the market is necessary there is always a big competition. But right now we’re speaking about the keywords competition. Sometimes a niche market can be saturated, but highly targeted keywords might still be available for you. For example the keywords with spelling mistakes always have low competition, but people make spelling mistakes very often in their search queries. Non-professionals go with broad keywords, but you can go with most relevant keywords with 4-5 words. These keywords very rarely have a big competition and expensive cost per click.
Another example:
“making money online fast” – no competition, cost per click - $0.05
“make money online fast” – great competition, cost per click - $3.69

3. Keyword Research

The purpose of researching keywords related to products before starting to promote it is to increase your sales and optimize your budget. The general rule is simple: minimize the investment, and increase the income to find the best return on investment (ROI). For example if you teaching how to make money on your website and go with
1) make money online
2) make money on website
Lots of people will click the first one, but if they’re not interested in making money on website, they will just leave your website and that’s all.
In the second case, your ad will click only people who are interested in making money on website.
First of all make money online keyword is much expensive then make money on website ($2.97 vs $0.05).
Secondly the second keyword will give you much bigger conversions.
Thirdly the second keyword will be clicked much rarely and only by people who’re really interested in making money on website.

4. What to Search for

Problems the product solves
PEOPLE ARE SEARCHING FOR SOLUTIONS AND ANSWERS TO THEIR QUESTIONS. If your website manages to solve them, you will have a great success. You should clearly emphasis on the problems your product or service solve. Offer people solutions to their existing problems. Make people clear about the benefits they will gain choosing your product or service. It makes a big sense to add solutions and answers related keywords to your keyword list.
For example, if you promote the products that focuses on weight loss, it’s highly likely that your potential customers will search for keywords like “quick weight loss”, “weight loss exercises”, “weight loss supplements”, etc.
People search for the benefit and the solution for their problems.
Make sure you understand what you are selling (invest some time reading about the products you promote) before selecting the main benefits and solutions the promoted product providers. It’s better to buy the product you’re promoting at first and read it. If you like it, then go ahead and promote. If you do not like it, forget about this. Promote only things you like. Remember your readers trust you, and if you would betray their trust, they will never come back and trust you.

5. Keyword Research Tools

There are great amount of software containing constantly updated and very detailed keyword databases. Many of these tools show the history of the searches made on the different networks and different periods of time and based on that, they can offer valuable information about people’s preferences and product popularity.

Keyword Tools have two principal purposes:
a. Generate new keyword ideas that you can use in your campaign to improve your ad’s visibility in your niche market.
b. Offer you reports about how popular your selected keywords are. Keyword tools count how many times a certain keyword has been searched in the past, so that you have a better idea if there are people searching for you keywords.

Reasons to use keyword research tools

1. Find more profitable keywords.
2. Get a leg up on the competition.
3. Become an expert in keyword research.
4. Save precious time.
5. Discover untapped niche markets.
6. Check keyword competition on multiple engines, directories and news sites.
7. Import and rank keywords.
8. Customize your research to get exactly what you want.
9. Keep your keyword research safe and accessible.

Here is the list of the perfect tools for keyword research. Some of them are free and others have a monthly fee. But of course if you’re serious about your business, it is worth to go with paid tools. They are much reliable and provide more details about the keywords.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker was established to answer a fundamental question in the search engine industry:
"What are people searching for on the Web?"
It helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client's business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors. Marketers can also determine how many competing sites are using those keywords and can identify the phrases that have the greatest traffic potential.
It periodically compiles a database of over 330 million search terms which is updated on a weekly basis. All search terms are collected from the major metacrawlers - Dogpile and Metacrawler.
It has a paid version for full access and advanced reports, as well as a very good free service which is perfect to get started:
Free Tool (limited results but helpful)
Paid Subscription (and free trial)

Good Keywords

Good Keywords makes use of various tools provided by search engines like the Overture Search Suggestion Tool, Search Engines Like Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask and other services like Alexa. Please note that you can manually do most of the tasks performed by Good Keywords. However using Good Keywords makes it all very simple, fast and straight forward.
You can also use Good Keywords as a meta tag creation tool. Keep adding the keywords you need into the Keyword Pad available within the software. Once you are done, a simple click will get you the required keyword meta tag... ready to be pasted into your HTML file. Good Keywords is Freeware! No registrations, No advertisements, No crippled features, No payments and No DLLs!
Good Keywords is just about 500KB to download and will not take even 5 minutes to download and install!

Google Keyword Tool

Google has good free tool to search for keywords ideas. While it is true that Google AdWords is very crowded and the prices there are prohibitive, you should take advantage of using their keyword tool for free

Keyword Discovery

This tool compiles keyword search statistics from over 180 search engines worldwide. It was developed by Trellian, a leading organization in this business.
Keyword Discovery will tell you the search phrases people use to find products and services associated with whatever it is you are researching, as well as the search terms that drive traffic to your competitors.

Creating a keywords report

Now you have the basic idea about keyword research. At this point you learn how to select good keywords, that have the power to lend your ads much greater visibility to potential customers, and boost your sales as a result.
Let’s say that you are promoting info products on how to make money. After you have studied the product you plan to promote you decide that its main benefits are: “make money fast”, “very small investment”, “very low risk”, “getting started in one day”…
Once you have the basic benefits like these, make a list of them and then add the more obvious keywords like “money making ideas”, “learn how to make money” and so on to your list. Finally, mix them together to create all possible combinations with those keywords. My advice is to create search terms that consist of two, three, four or even five words, because an internet users’ tendencies have changed and people write long queries to find what they are looking for.
Submit the keywords to one of the Keyword Research tools to see the results. Results will come up together with synonyms or relevant keywords (e.g. the keyword “money making website”). Select those keywords that are logical and suit to your product. Do not worry if you get a list of a hundred results already. It good!
When using the paid keyword research tools (Keyword Discovery or WordTracker), you have information about how many times a keyword was searched, as well as details about the “competition” – judged by the amount of results there are for a specific term.
Export the results to Excel or similar spreadsheet and make sure to have a column with the keywords, another with searches and one more showing ‘ads competition’… now we are almost done with compiling your killer keyword report!
Order your list by prioritizing it according to the amount of competing ads there are (from lower to higher competition), and then use this simple formula.

Now, you need to highlight the keywords that:
1) Have less competition
2) Have a higher number of searches
3) Are more relevant to the product
There will be some keywords that will be very easy to identify as being exactly what you are looking for and others where you will have to analyze a bit more. You have to use your common sense to distinguish the keywords that can fit the three parameters (or more probably, just two of them and that is fine too, as not all keywords will be a perfect match).
Now that you have refined your list and have many highly targeted keywords, separate them into categories (they will be the basis of you various ad groups). Try to segment your categories as much as possible, as the more specific your ad group is the easier will be for you to monitor the results and make the necessary changes.
Your keyword must be relevant all the way from the search to the sale, including when you’re creating your ad group, in your ads, on the landing page, and then finally even at the shopping cart stage of the sales process. It is a long process, so undertaking the necessary segmentation increases quality and ensure greater conversions.
Now that you have the relevant categories (ad groups to be) and relevant keywords for each one, you can make sure that you have a killer keywords report!
Once again I want to stress upon the significance of segmenting your keywords. If there are keywords about make money, DO NOT mix them with make money on website or make money on forex. Even though the meaning is the same, you have to keep them in different categories. If you follow this rule, you are already well on your way to success.
When you’re running an advertising campaign, depending on how much traffic your keywords are generating, you may find that there are some traffic peaks for some keywords. This especially happens when starting a new ad group. You might need to adjust the keywords you’re using. For example, you will probably need to remove keywords terms that are too broad. But of course see the statistics, if they’re converting well, leave them.

There is a new method to maximize your exposure and get rid of many competitors:
1. Use your keywords without spaces
For example, if your keyword is making money online', you can write 'makingmoneyonline', 'makingmoney online' and 'making moneyonline'
2. Write the keywords in the wrong order: 'money online making' or 'making online money'. It is also important to remember to add all excluded words possible to your ad group, as you don't want to get unwanted clicks.
3. Use common mistakes
How to find these mistakes:
a. use the keywords programs such as Good Keywords. They have the ability to generate words with mistakes
b. try to type the phrase fast, then faster and faster and for few minutes you will have major possible mistakes for current key phrase.

Why it is worth to do this?
You do this because people type fast and in many cases they don't notice their typos. This is incredible way to gain very cheap and targeted traffic.