The first step to optimizing your website is obviously selecting the right keywords you want to target. Here is a list of most used and effective keyword research techniques that will make your seo campaign start of the right foot.

Techniques: Vertical keyword research

Think of the most common and the most general terms that you yourself would use to find the service or products offered by your website. For example, let’s say we have a website that sells ink and laser printer cartridges. Some of the most common and generic keywords i would use to find this product are:

printer toner
printer cartridges
ink cartridges
toner cartridges

Then we need to take these keywords one by one and run them through Google adwords keyword tool. Each time you get the search results sort them out by the most searched and go from top to the bottom picking the ones that you believe are the most relevant to your product. This way you generate a list of the most searched AND most relevant keywords. You do not want to get a list bigger than 30 keywords. If you do – trim it to leave only 30 that are the most searched. That way you will focus your seo campaign in the right direction. Sometimes, you will come across situations when your list of high volume keywords is under 10 keywords. In that case I would suggest taking the new keywords you have just generated and running them again through google adwords tool. Normally that should be sufficient to generate a list bigger than 10 keywords, but sometimes not. In this case we are using our next technique.

Techniques: keyword Brainstorming

This is a good technique to use when you have a very limited number of volume keywords in your niche or when you want to extend the list of targeted keywords. One great way of doing that is by spying on your competition. Find the most competitive website that ranks for your related keywords and run a google keyword check on them using the same Google Adwords tool. Another great tool you can use is wordtracker.com – to access their service on regular bases you have to signup for a paid subscription, but they have been working on and modifying their tool almost since the search engines exist and have excelled at helping you find the keywords that you would not even think people are using to search for your product or service.

Techniques: Horizontal keyword research

Horizontal research is good in case you have a wide line of products. Let’s look at the ink cartridges example again. Your company might be offering a wide range of ink and laser cartridges, these might include:
Hp printer cartridges
Lexmark printer cartridges
Xerox printer cartridges
And so on. You can even narrow it down to specific models. It is important to have your website optimized for all of these keywords as well. Each one of these keywords normally will not drive big amount of traffic, but a sum of visits for each one of them will.

So which technique is better?

There is no single technique that is ultimate. Ideal i would suggest using all of them when building your keywords list.

Here are link to useful tools that will help you do a better keyword research:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

http://keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

https://www.wordtracker.com/