Before we get into the meat of this, I just want to say a couple things. I like to use a lot of tools. You are going to quickly discover that SEO can be very time consuming. The things that I recommend are tools that I use to save time. The links that I use will more than likely be affiliate links.

I have run across people that say that you shouldn't use affiliate links when giving away free content but my question to them is why not? We are all doing this to eventually make money. That is just business. I do have a problem with people that promote products that they have never even used. I can assure you that if I recommend a product, it is because it has helped me to save time, make money, or just make life easier in general. With that said, lets talk about finding your keywords.

I use a tool called Keyword Elite. This is a very powerfull peice of software that can do much more than generate a keyword list. I am not going to spend 2 or 3 paragraphs listing all of the features here. If you want to find out more, click on the link and skim through the sales page til you get to the videos. Take the time to watch the videos and you will see why I use this tool.

But that's not all. Keyword Elite can get you results from ask.com, google suggestion tool, yahoo, free keywords WT, keyword discovery, and word tracker. The last two require that you are a paid member of keyword discovery and word tracker. You enter your user name and passwords and the program automatically logs in when you do a search. I personally use the paid version of Word Tracker with Keyword Elite.

If you don't want to make the investment into your business right now don't worry. There are a couple of decent free tools that you can use. The best of these is Word Tracker. The reason I think this is one of the best is because the results you get are the exact phrases that were searched for. Some programs will re-arrange the wording of the phrase. My second pick is a program called Good Keywords. If you use both of these together you should be able to generate a decent keyword list.

I highly recommend that when you can afford to, you upgrade your account at Word Tracker which is about $300 a year (you can pay by the month also but it is more expensive) and then buy Keyword Elite which is around $175 and use the two in conjunction like I do. The videos will show you what Keyword Elite can do and you can try a free trial of Word Tracker here.

What ever tool you are going to use, enter  your main keyword relevant to your topic and generate your list. We are going to try and target keywords that don't have a lot of competition but still get a decent amount of searches per month. I would make a list of the top 20 to 30 keywords in your list. Now you need to use your judgement here. If your niche is something uber popular like "weight loss", you might want to go ahead and eliminate some of the most searched for phrases because there will be a huge amount of competition. On the other hand, you might find one of those hidden gems that the majority is not targeting. It's a matter of how much time do you want to spend. That is why I buy the tools.

If you are using the paid version of Word Tracker or KE, the program will tell you how much competition each keyword in your list has. If you are using free programs, here is how I determine how competitive a keyword is.

I make a spread sheet in excel with the following columns, Keyword, All In Anchor, "results", and searches. Then add your keywords to the keyword column and how many times it has been searched in the searches column. Sort by number of searches. Now open up google. Type in allinanchor:"your keyword" and record the number of results in the All In Anchor column. This will tell you how many websites are actually targeting that keyword phrase with anchor text links on the site. These are your competition.

Now type in "your keyword" and record the number of results in the "results" column. This will tell you how many websites contain your exact keyword phrase within their website. Do this for your top 20 to 30 keywords and then compare. Look at your All In Anchor column. Do you have any keywords with less than 1000? If so, you can easily dominate the search results in Google for those keywords. You want to look for the ones that fit this criteria and still get a lot of searches. Those are the diamonds in the rough that we are looking for.

This is going to take some time so I am going to stop for now. The next post we will continue with the keywords and talk about some strategy. Have your spread sheet or something similar ready.