There are a LOT of keyword research tools out there, but sometimes these tools give you inaccurate data or perceptions.

A lot of times with new websites you’re tempted to generate a keywords list based on the top related searches, then you head out to create site content and/or articles targeting those terms…

Sounds like a good plan, right?

Couple of things wrong with that plan, though

#1 – Inaccurate keyword research data leads to a lot of time wasted sometimes, especially if you are facing stiff competition in the search engines for those terms

#2 – The keyword research tools don’ t give you any proof that these terms are profitable, so even if you did manage to rank well for those terms in your keywords list, you still don’t know if these are to generic to convert well.

There are 2 ways to instantly tell if your keywords are worth targeting

The first way is to do a search for your keyword until you find an article published on an article directory like EzineArticles dot com..

If you type in a search term and this “EZA” article shows up, then you can go to that article and scroll down until you see how many views that page  received so far, and when it was published.

Free Keyword Research

So, if an article was published one month ago and got 30 page views, then that PAGE gets 1 visitor a day on average.  If the article was really highly ranked, like position 1-3 then you pretty much know how many daily searches there are for that keyword.

This is the reality of keyword research as it boils down to your main concern, which is,

“how many visitors a day will I receive by being highly ranked for this keyword?”

This method works well if your keyword search ends up displaying an article directory article on Page 1.

The second method for more accurately determining EXACTLY how many searches a day a certain keyword search gets on Google is to set up a PPC campaign.

• When you set this Pay Per click campaign up, you make sure your bid is high enough to get page 1 presence.
• Then you merely let that ride for a few days, preferably during the week when there are more searches.
• Since you’re paying for Page 1 displays for that keyword every time it gets searched for, you will see the number of impressions your PPC ad got.
• This doesn’t mean you’re paying for clicks,though since all you’re trying to do here is pay for Page 1 impressions, and you don’t have to be in the top positioned AD to get those impressions.
• So when someone searches for a particular term and your ad is page 1, its gets an impression every time its searched for on Google.

And that’s the most accurate way to tell exactly how many searches a certain term gets! 

ALSO: Doing niche research on your own manually without tools will also reveal to you related keywords your target audience is interested in.

A lot of people and companies offer the service of doing keyword research for you.  But what are you getting exactly?

The low-end types will use Yahoo Overture and tell you what keywords to use.
The next step up is people who use a combination of services and tools to compile more relevant data like Search Volume, KEI values, Number of Competing sites etc….
However, research is always done by humans and always subject to their interpretations of what words and phrases to use.  The person doing the KW research for you is probably someone who has a different goal in mind than you do.
I ran into this issue recently from a reputable service provider with whom I am still working.

Here is what happened:
I hired someone to do some traffic generation for me, and was outsourcing/outtasking a new project to them.
Their service included:
Doing some “deep” KW research and returning with a list of keywords and phrases for some content.  Creation of Squidoo lenses and adding periodic content to them, and social bookmarking some articles written and submitted by them for m
Here’s what the problem was:
There was a disconnect right from the get-go.  They were interested in KEI values since these would help me get traffic right away.  I was interested in achieving SERPs and rankings for specific terms.
KEI is a ratio/score of search results/search volume.  KEI basically is an indicator of how many people are searching for something and how many competing sites there are for just that one keyword.
Article marketers, listen up! KEI is what you want to focus on.  Articles writen with KEI in mind will get traffic right away
Site owners looking for rankings, listen up!  SERPS, backlinks, indexed pages, keyword density is what you should be concerned with if you have a long term approach to the business.
The story continues, I get ticked off!
So, I’m going over MY truly deep KW research analysis sheet and comparing it to my new outsource team’s KW research.
Wow, almost nothing was the same… Did I get ripped off by someone who has hoping to take advantage of a newbie?

I know how to do the truly deep research, and was testing and double-checking my outsourcing team’s work.  I was about to ask for a refund when something dawned on me.
All niche and keyword research is not the same.

My outsourcing team was focused in getting immediate traffic for me via articles based focus on KEI-laden keyword research.   My focus was on long-term gains in the SERPs, but I’m OK with getting immediate traffic, too.

Anyways, the discovery was another hard-won battle in the trenches for me.  I found out stuff that only the true experts know, and I found it out from a BUM.  A Bum Marketer, that is.  an article marketer/niche marketer.

Even though I “laid at his feet” and listened like a sponge, it was still quite overwhelming how much data there is to pore over before you start to get a clear picture of what Keywords you really want.

So, if you’re an article marketer, find relevant keywords with good KEI values for your articles
As an article marketer, your goal isn’t necessarily to gain rankings or get better SERPs.  Your goal is immediate type-in traffic that finds your articles and sends people to your links eventually.
If you’re a website owner trying to figure out what you want your site to rank well for, there are many factors to consider.
1- How long are you willing to wait to unseat the entrenched top ranked sites?
2-   How much time, effort, and money are you willing to spend to gain SERPs?
The answers to these 2 questions will help make the rest of the decisions easier.  Now, when doing Keyword Research with a long-term SEO view, not the KEI/article marketer’s view, then you need to take into consideration the following factors.
Search volume- obviously a pretty important statistic.  You want a few hundred searches a month, at least.  But remember that ranking #1 for a KW that is extremely targeted is often better than 10X the traffic to a generic term that doesn’t conver the visito rinto a reader, buer, subscriber eetc…
Number of Competing sites-  the number is almost always going to be 10, since you’re really only worried about the top 10 site sin the SERPs.  these 10 sites represent page 1 of search engine sites, and everything else is unimportant, IMHO.
Number of indexed pages- This surprised me as being an important factor.
Who care how many pages a site has, right?  Well, apparently the search engines do because it’s one of the reporting features that they look at when spidering sites and research tools usually return this as a sought after value, too.  Looking back on things, I can see that it’s true.  One of my review sites outranks other sites in the same niche because of the large number of indexexed pages it has, even thoug hit has less links pointing towards it.
Number of backlinks- Pretty important.
The more links that point back to your sites with the proper anchor text, the more “votes” that say your site is about XYX content.  Generally speaking, the more links you have, the better, but links from related sites that point back to your site with anchor text…that’s much, much better.
So, in order to do some Deep Keyword research you need to know your goals ahead of time.
KEI and immediate traffic   OR   Long term SERPS?
Once you know this, its time to gather all this data together and make decisions…
If you read this far down, then you definitely want to get my free newsletter on  How To Find Hot Niches For Niche Affiliate Marketing by going to http://nicheaffiliatemarketingsecrets.com

If there’s one thing that many people disagree on, it’s Keyword Research.

A lot of niche marketers will tell you that KW research is everything, and that is only partially true.

Some SEO experts say that keyword research is kind of a waste of time, and here’s why:
Keyword research tools like Google’s External Keyword Tool, Marketing Samurai, SEOBook, Niche Inspector/Detective, Overture, Wordtracker, etc… all mislead you when they provide you with the number of competing sites as a relevant indicator of the SEO competition for a keyword or niche, or keyphrases.
The number of competing sites simply doesn’t matter because all that means is the search engine found XX number of sites that have that word on their site somewhere.

Not many of those sites are actually dedicated to the exact keyword or term you’re going after here, therefore there really isn’t a lot of competition for the keywords you’re targeting.
Theoretically, there could be ZERO competition for the term you’re going after because not a lot of sites actually dedicated themselves to ranking well for the keywords they’re showing up in the SERPs for… they’re just there.

When keyword research tools show you a really high number of competing sites for a keyword or phrase this will make you think that a certain niche isn’t worth targeting, and this is my main point here on why this statistic (# of competing sites) means very little to you when deciding on what keywords and niches to target.

Here’s an example of how my site ranks #2 or 3 amongst 24 MILLION other sites by making a few simple changes to my blog
The search query:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS277US278&q=marketing+business+product+reviews

My blog  ranks #2 or 3 for this without a sweat, but a keyword research tool would show you that based on # of competing sites, this term isn’t worth going after.
I do agree that the term in that search isn’t worth going after, but only because they’re aren’t a lot of people searching for that exact phrase, so it’s not worth my time to target those keywords.

How did I outrank 24 million other sites so quickly?
By making the site properly optimized for those terms.  I have ZERO backlinks to this site with those words in the anchor text of the links.
But who the heck is searching for that exact term?
Not many people search for that term… so the  # of competing sites is not indicative of a search term’s popularity, only how many sites Google decided to include in the index for those terms.
What does matter?
Search volume matters, really….who cares if you outrank 24 million other sites if there’s no traffic for that term?
The keyword research tools mentioned above show you the search volume in addition to # of competing sites.  However, these tools also show wide ranges of numbers of searches for the same terms entered into each tool…
This means that not one of these tools can be regarded as “Gospel” so you need to take everything you’re being handed with a grain of salt.
Why do Keyword Research Tools show such varying numbers?
Because they’re pulling from different databases, or have outdated information or just revealing what they want to reveal (kind of like how Google doesn’t really show an accurate number for how many backlinks your site has pointing to it, but Yahoo Search Marketing does…)
Also, Google’s tool shows the $$ being spent on PPC as an indicator of $$$ being spent in a niche, but that’s only telling you what’s being spent on pay per click advertising…  Some niches many not do well with pay-per-click marketing…
I know for a fact that this is misleading because I have a client who is getting a lot of traffic easily to her site, and there’s a ton of money in this niche.
The SEO competition was allegedly fierce, but it wasn’t so performing basic SEO works wonders for her site.

Since we believed what these tools were telling us, we shot too low and went after less competive terms and got high rankings easily,even with her PageRank dropping, too.

Since the SEO competition wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, we revised the site to go after the KWs we thought were previously unreachable, SERPS-wise…
A GOOD Keyword Research tool will tell you the in-depth SEO analysis of those “competing sites in the top ten for that term.

Micro Niche Finder does that, by the way…

• I highly recommend you don’t aim low with your SEO and just exercise basic SEO to rank well for your terms.
• Get a KW rich domain name…
• Have it SEO-ed for 2 or 3 main terms…
• Then analyze your tracking statistics to see what you’re actually being found for, and you’ll see terms there NO KW tool uncovered for you.
• Then write about those “weird” terms you see your site getting found for.  This is sort of a backwards way of doing LSI for your site, but it works.

Kurt Melvin (SEO guy with 12 years of SEO experience) once said that KW research is an “iffy” thing at best because the way people search is ever-changing.

In the 70s, people said G’s to mean thousands, now in the computer age with K meaning kilobytes, or thousand bytes, we now say K instead of G to mean “thousand”.
Not many people say I want to make 10 Gs a month, and now more people say I want to make 10k a month.

People’s search, language and behavior patterns change over time, so being “married” to a keyword or keyphrase or keyword research tool leaves you trying to get traffic for a limited # of search terms…

How insulting is it to pay a monthly fee for a keyword research tool that is leading you astray?

• The SAFE way to do keyword research is to use a variety of tools and find the common ground.
• The SECRET to getting traffic and high SERPs isn’t always vast numbers of links, but highly targetted links.

What do the search engines have to do to stay in business?
They have to provide the most relevant search results to their searchers or they’ll go out of business, right?

So how do you make your site seem more relevant to the search engines eyes?

• Link yourself to other sites that rank well for the terms you’re going after.
• Find the top 10 sites in your niche and comment on the EZA articles,  Squidoo lenses, hub pages and blog posts…
• You can even trackback to other blog posts if you want.  As a blog owner myself I delete all trackbacks that are not from good sites, but I DO leave the trackbacks that are from related sites. This bolsters me in the SERPs, and them, too.
• It ties us both together in a WEB of sorts.  Yes, a WEB…You know….the WEB…the Internet (interlinked sites sending traffic and relevancy to each other) ?

If your SEO competition is doing their job well, then you’ll still need to get some backlinks.

Get backlinks with ANCHOR text in them linking to your sites.
Anchor text describes the site it’s linking to, lending relevancy to the site the anchor text is linking to for the clickable words that construe the text.

I have yet to meet the person who told me they’re getting the exact amount of traffic a keyword tool told them to expect to get for a certain term they’re ranking well for.

You need to get found for ALL the terms that are related to your site, not just one.
As mentioned above, you can install a tracking script on your site to see exactly who, what, why, where, when your sites’ visitors are coming to your site.
WHY they’re coming to your site is important because it lets you know what you should be writing about more often.
This is a tip you don’t see spoken about too often, but it’s a great way to make your site seem like it has an overall tighter theme, content-wise.

This Micro Niche Finder Review explains how I got my hands on MicroNichefinder a few months ago but hardly ever used it at first, (I will explain why later).

The reason why Micro Niche Finder beats out a lot of other keyword research tools is the following:

1- It’s now pulling from Google for its search volume results, and not WordTracker like some out-dated keyword research tools are doing.

2- It analyzes the profitability of a niche based on the keywords you entered, and seeing how much people are spending to advertise these keywords via Pay Per Click (if people are spending over a dollar per click for a keyword, there’s money in that niche, and especially for those keywords)

3- It can “dig down” to find keywords and phrases with little competition and can create huge Keywords lists in a matter of minutes.

4- It analyzes the SEO competition for those terms based on InAnchor, InTitle, and InURL, which means it’s telling you how many people are doing proper optimization for those terms by:
· using proper anchor text, (InAnchor)
· putting the keywords in the title, (InTitle)
· and even putting the keywords in the domain name ( InURL…a dead giveaway that someone is “going after” this term…)

5-If you’re stuck on where to start for keywords and have no niches in mind already that you want to research, you merely hit the Brainstorming or HotTrends buttons to get a big list returned to you (this helps when you don’t know where to start…)

The best thing about MicroNichefinder- there’s NO monthly fee, like some other keyword tools.

The second best thing about MicroNichefinder- it’s being upgraded soon (at the time of this wiriting) to include some point-and-click-easy ways to find hot profitable niches…

The BAD part about MicroNichefinder- James is going to raise the price soon after the BIG upgrade is done…and may even raise the price to a monthly fee, but if you get MicroNicheFinder before he does that, then you’ll never pay for upgrades or monthly fees.

My recommendations:

Get it now before price goes up so you can get the free upgrades. If you’re not a niche marketer, you still need to know what kind of traffic is easily obtained and MicroNicheFinder does that for you as well.

Definitely get this if you’re niche affiliate marketing, because it tells you whether or not a niche is worth getting into before you spent time on it… saving you hours of valuable time…

Download MicroNicheFinder Here, You will get immediate access to 5 Bonus Videos on that page