It's been said that every, every, everything online starts with keywords, and that's pretty close to the truth. If your running a PPC ad campaign, you absolutely need to know what people are searching for. If you advertise using keywords that nobody uses in their searches, how much traffic would you expect to get? Whether traffic is coming from organic search results or PPC ads, keywords are foundational.

So you've got to start somewhere, right?

If you follow the keyword brainstorming game plan as outlined below you'll have an awesome keyword list that will do wonders in helping you target the right crowd.

1. Think of the most common terms related to your product or service.
• These are the words and phrases that you think a prospect would type into a search engine if they were looking for your exact product or service.
  
  
2. Create a list of other products and services (including brand names and model names) that your target prospects buy or are interested in.
   
   
3. Go to Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com)
• Find books that your target prospects might read.
• Read the reviews and details of each book to discover additional keyword phrases and ideas that you might not have thought of.
• Research the other books and products that Amazon.com's technology displays as "people that bought this book also bought this..."
• Find the other products that your prospects are buying to get some additional ideas.
  
  
4. Do searches in several search engines for the primary keyword phrases for your market.
• http://www.google.com
• http://www.yahoo.com
• http://www.altavista.com
• http://www.alltheweb.com
• http://www.overture.com
• http://search.msn.com
• http://search.aol.com
• http://search.netscape.com
• http://www.excite.com
• http://www.ask.com
• http://www.teoma.com
  
  
• Visit each of the top-ranked sites.
• View the "source" of each homepage of those sites to discover the "meta name=keywords" list of keywords. You will often find additional that you haven't even thought of.
  
  
5. Use a thesaurus or go to http://www.thesaurus.com to find additional keyword words and phrases that have the same meaning as the other primary terms in you list.
   
   
6. AltaVista - http://www.altavista.com - Do a search for a keyword / keyword phrase and on the results page, look on the right-hand side for additional suggested keywords.
   
   
7. Google Sandbox keyword suggestion tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox - Outstanding keyword research tool.
   
   
8. Google Suggest (BETA) - Google Suggest - Just start typing in a keyword and see what happens.
   
   
9. KWMap - http://www.kwmap.com - Very nice keyword research tool for going lateral.
   
   
10. Teoma - http://www.teoma.com - Do a search for a keyword / keyword phrase and on the results page, look on the right-hand side for additional suggested keywords.
    
    
11. Good Keywords (Free Software) - http://www.goodkeywords.com/ - Queries Overture.com for keyword suggestions and give search frequency (Overture only) in the results.
    
    

If you've made it this far and used even 1/3 of the sources listed above, you've got a killer keyword list. There are some software programs on the market that make quick work of your keyword research and if you're interested in learning more about them, feel free to contact me (Ron Hutton) by CLICKING HERE.

I hope that you've found this information useful. Good keyword hunting!

Ron Hutton
SuperSite & IBSoftShop Manager - Team Leader