I do not normally just point at an article and say: read this article on How to Choose a Popular Niche for Your Blog. But not because it's well written (all his stuff is) and not because we need more bloggers (we don't!) but because it is a very well written example of how to do keyword research.

Hitting Homeruns With Keyword Chains

I'm not going to repeat what was in the article, just note that the process is a lot like the more formal brainstorming techniques (if that isn't an oxymoron!) where you take an idea and do the permutations and combinations.

And what results is called a etiological keychain. And now you know why he didn't use that term - I think I just heard 100 people groan and leave.

But what you have is a primary cause (keyword) and all the phrases and keywords associated with it and their probability (search frequency).

The value of this sort of graph is that you can determine which words you need to use around your content in order to get the right kind of SERP love.

Actionable

It all sounds very intellectual and theoretical, but it is very actionable information. If you have the phrase "driving technique" as a key phrase and the suggestion comes back that "snow driving" has 1K searches a day, well, you can do something about that to capture traffic.

Product Keywords

The only problem with the above examples is that you have to create content around them. Which is expensive and time consuming. But if you are selling products then this is a pretty quick exercise, even if you have a LOT of products.

And, of course, you can get a LOT of leverage from this quickly if you use google base to make sure your products are powerfully searched and displayed .

Unfortunately Manual

Here's the problem: you need to keep up with this stuff. And you need to refresh it regularly because search terms do change. And this is a manual process, which means that it is:

• Expensive to execute
• Tedious