All This Talk About Rankings - Here's How I Do My Keyword Research

I felt that as I talk so much about rankings and keywords and such, I would write a little entry on how I do my keyword research for those of you reading.

Like most people, I started out with the Google Keyword Tool. I still use it now from time to time actually. After a while though, I wanted something that gave me more info and organized the info better. I gave the free trial of Market Samurai a shot, was very impressed but eventually settled on Micro Niche Finder.

I can't speak highly enough of it. You type a base keyword in, and it brings back up to 200 keyword suggestions. It of course brings up the monthly search volume of each keyword, and you can see how many competing sites there are, but if you want to quickly see what your chances of ranking are, you click 'SOC' which stands for Strength of Competition. It will bring up either a red, yellow or green and a numerical value. Green obviously means the term isn't too competitive, yellow means it's moderately competitive and red means it's very competitive. The lower the numerical value, the better.

In addition, with one click of a button you can see if the .com, .org and .net domains are available, and you can even check the 'strength of backlinks' the top 10 for each terms have. There's much more too, including the ability to save keywords into projects.

I take all the information I get from MNF as a guide - a pretty darn good guide though. After I have a keyword, or set of keywords, I'll use the SEO Quake firefox extension to investigate further. With this you can see the page rank each site has, and delve even deeper into just what makes these sites rank so well. If I want to have a really detailed look into a site's backlinks, I will use SEO Spyglass(one of the Link Assistant tools I mentioned in an earlier post).

I firmly believe that if you do the right things, you can rank well for pretty much any term, but implementing these tools and strategies really helps me to target good keywords, and helps me to have an understanding about what I need to do to rank.

I keep lists of keywords in my MNF projects - I use these keywords mostly for article titles(whether it be on my sites or in directories/web 2.0 sites), and keyword rich domains. That's pretty much how I do things - it has served me well so far.