A lot has been written on keyword research. This is the criteria I use to analyze keywords and decide whether they’re worth pursuing.

Do They Convert?
This is the most important factor to consider. Before doing SEO, it’s always a good idea to do a PPC campaign and test your keywords. I can guarantee that half of the keywords you choose by doing keyword research will not make you any money. Don’t waste a year doing SEO for them. Run a PPC campaign and see what keywords make you money before targeting those terms with SEO.

Are They “Action” or “Research” Keywords?
Some keywords indicate that people are ready to take action and others indicate that they’re just doing research. A person will start by doing research and then possibly take some sort of action. You want to attract people in this last stage. For example, someone who wants to buy a car will start by searching for something like “best cars of 2010″. They’ll find a few cars they like and they’ll do research on them. In this stage they’ll search for something like “Audi S4 2010″. Once they decide they want to get that car, they’ll search for “Audi dealership in Seattle”. That’s the keyword you want.

Do They Have High Search Volumes?
Obviously, keywords with a lot of searches are better than keywords with just a few. But, keep in mind it’s all about conversions. If keyword A brings you 1,000 visitors and 1 conversion a day and keyword B brings you 200 visitors and 5 conversions a day, you should choose keyword B.

Are They Hard to Rank For?
I don’t discard keywords just because they’re hard; I know that I can get a top ranking for pretty much any keyword I choose. But I do consider how much time and money it’ll take for me to get there and sometimes it just doesn’t make sense.

Current Ranking
With SEO, you see a bigger traffic increase from going from position 8 to position 2 than you do from going from position 300 to 12. Therefore, checking where I am in the rankings for each of my keywords is crucial. If I see a keyword in position 11 (second page) that is getting a lot of traffic, I know that by getting to position 10 (first page) I’ll see a nice boost in traffic. I use Google Analytics to check what keywords send me traffic and I check my current positions for those keywords. If I see keywords between positions 11 and 50, I know those are great opportunities.

Tools I Use
For initial keyword research:

• My brain (to come up with some keyword ideas)
• Google (to spy on my competitor keywords)
• Google AdWords (to run PPC campaigns and find keywords that convert)
• Google Keyword Tool (to come up with keywords and find out traffic volume)
• SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool (it’s a paid tool. This is a free one)
• RankChecker for Firefox (to check my search engine rankings)

In his brilliant book The Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris talks at length about how to build a fully automated business in a few weeks. Since he wrote the book a few years ago, the tools have become even more efficient and powerful. Let’s discuss how you can build a complete business in a weekend.

Step 1: Market Research – 30 Minutes
Spend some time with the Google Key Word Analyzer tools:
•    www.google.com/sktool/ - will let you look at keywords across all categories.

•    https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - will let you really dig into keywords and determine exact traffic in your market

Choosing a market by starting with keyword analysis is an amazing 21st Century advancement. Market research used to take months of research in libraries, phone calling, and focus groups. Now you can do extensive market research in a few minutes.

When you’re looking for a market, pay attention to two important things:

1.    How competitive is the market?

2.    Is this something I actually care about?

It’s always a lot harder to run a business that you don’t care about.

Step 2: Choose a Product – A Few Hours
Pick a product with decent margins and preferably in the $100-1000 range. This makes the financials much easier to work with. The best products are intellectual property that can’t easily be copied, like an e-book or a DVD package that you created. Take a look around on Clickbank.com or other affiliate programs for a product that fits your market. The goal is to be at a 4x to 5x mark up to maximize your profits.

It’s important to note that you don’t actually have to build a product right away. You can use this process to test a business model and see if it’s a viable industry to compete in.

Step 3: Build a website – One Afternoon
There’s a new tool we’ve been playing with for a few months. SquareSpace.com lets you build a complete website in literally a few minutes. It comes with all the tools you’d need:
•    Blog engine

•    Photo gallery

•    Analytics

•    Templates

•    Form Building and Data Collection

•    Custom Editing and Content Management

•    Fully export and import other blogs

The price tag is a tiny $8/month and you can get a full featured site for $14/month. What’s even more impressive is how a tool like this can help you build a real business in a really short time.

Most of your time will be spent writing the copy for the website. Copy writing can be tough, but make it easy on yourself:
•    Use Short Paragraphs

•    Use Bullet Point Lists

•    Use Lots of Sub Headlines

•    Keep Everything Short

•    Don’t Be Afraid to Be Light and Humorous

Use paypal.com to set up a “buy now” button for the amount of your product. You can explore more sophisticated payment options in the future, but paypal.com is free to set up and inexpensive to use.

Step 4: Buy Some Traffic – 2 Hours
You’ve done some keyword research, now it’s time to buy a bit of traffic and see if your product will work. Adwords.Google.com is incredibly fast and easy to set up. A few clicks and you can set up a campaign to start driving traffic to your product.

Step 5: Does it Work?
Run Google Adwords for a few weeks and start to gather some data. You’ll get a good idea if your product works or not. There are tons of resources on this site on how to improve a PPC campaign, get better conversion rates, and boost traffic. But the most important thing is to get started right away.

If you can demonstrate that your business works, then you can start exploring ways to automate marketing and improve conversions. Once you have an automated business, you can move onto the next one.

Don’t Forget to Subscribe by RSS or Email:

Do you think that SEO is rocket science? What if I gave you a step-by-step plan that has worked for us and our clients time and time again? What if it was so easy than even a computer-idiot could do it?

Today we will talk about the very first step of SEO, keyword research.

Step 1: Coming up with a list of possible keywords
Let’s say you sell furniture online. Some of the keywords that I could think of are: wood table, metal dresser, kitchen furniture set. Make this list a lot longer. Add as many keywords as you can think of.

Step 2: Use a keyword research tool to get even more keywords
I love WordTracker and even the free version provides priceless information. When I enter “furniture” on WordTracker I get a lot of suggestions: dorm furniture, patio furniture, storage furniture, office furniture. This will give you a lot of keywords you didn’t think of before.

Step 3: Check search volume
You can use WordTracker or/and Google Keyword Tool to find out how many searches your keywords have. You don’t want to waste your time optimizing your website for keywords that are searched for once a month.

Step 4: Check competition
After you’ve found relevant keywords with a good search volume you have to make sure that they are relatively easy to rank for. The less competition, the better. You can go to Google and type “allintitle:patio furniture” (without the quotes) and it will tell you how many websites are competing for that same term.

At this point you should have 5-10 keywords that are highly relevant to your business, have a lot of monthly searches, and are not too competitive.