Have you been doing your own SEO keyword research and if yes, are you confident that you are using the right approach? As you may already know, keyword research should be among the first things that you should be doing in your search engine optimization. In this article I will be sharing with you the steps that I take whenever I conduct my own keyword research.

Step number one for me is to have a complete understanding of what my website stands for or what it is all about. You might say that it is a very easy thing and that your site’s topic should be very obvious to you and to other people. But the truth of the matter is that it is not a simple thing to do. Not all website owners fully understands what the overall topic of their website is, especially if their site contains so many pages with varying themes or topics. Naturally it would be harder to say that your website is just about one topic. So why is this important? It’s because keyword research and search engine optimization is more effective and easier to do if you are working with only a handful of keywords.

After that what I would do is to open up the tool that I would use for my keyword research. For this I usually utilize the free keyword research tool that Google provides us. Of course you can use any other keyword tool as there are many such tools, both proprietary and free. However, if you ask me it is better to use just one tool, or two at the most, when conducting your keyword research. This is because it will simply the whole process for you and you will not have to evaluate a great amount of information. And I only deal with long tail keywords as the broad keywords are often harder to compete in.

The single most important data that I look at in the keyword research tool is the monthly search volume.  As far as I know, most internet marketers also do this. I pick out the keywords with a satisfactory amount of monthly searches. In my case, below ten thousand is usually good enough. Then I search for that keyword in the search engine and if there are just a few results, I keep that keyword aside for further evaluation and possible inclusion in my keyword list.

Now if I am doing my search engine optimizing for just one website, I make sure that there is only one theme or topic for it. I also apply that thought to my keyword research as it will be the main factor in my site’s optimization. With just one theme, your seo campaign will be laser-focused and it will be easier for Google and the other search engines to rank your website properly.

So how many keywords do I usually get? It depends on how many pages my website contains. This is because I make it a policy to use just one or two keywords per page. Again this has something to do with ensuring that my website is focused.

More keyword research ideas have been written and discussed but the points mentioned here are among the basics that you must understand whenever you are doing your own keyword research for seo. Keep everything simple so as not to waste your time on keyword research alone and to give you time to work on other seo techniques.