The Art of Finding Keywords

Several years ago, finding keywords was a breeze. Most of us can remember when coming up with a competitive keyword phrase was as easy as finding a niche market, buying an exact match domain name, and loading up pages with one- or two-word keyword phrases was about all there was to search engine optimization. Today however, things have changed. There is a definite art to finding keywords, which usually requires moving towards the long tail and getting a bit creative. But as long as you create a solid plan and pay attention to what other Internet marketers are doing, finding keywords isn’t really much more difficult than it used to be.

Using a Mind Map

In 2007, Google’s VP of Engineering, Ubi Mander gave a report on search volume and read one statistic that surprised quite a few Internet marketers. According to Mander, as many as 25 percent of the keywords that would be searched that day would be keywords that Google had never seen before. Today, the more than 15.4 billion searches that Google users perform each month haven’t yielded much different results — with around 20 percent being entirely unique each day.

For Internet marketers, this means that mind mapping has become one of the most effective ways to generate intelligent and profitable keyword phrases. Mind mapping is an excellent tool as it requires your own mind to generate keyword ideas, not other peoples’ publications or tools. In general, mind mapping is simply guessing which keyword phrases will gain traffic, based on popular phrases. Those popular phrases come with large competitors, and their large budgets. But you can target more specific phrases to get the smaller, and often more profitable, traffic volumes.

For example, consider the keyword phrase “wireless Internet” — a very competitive phrase. Now consider which searches are more likely to end in conversions. Many people that include terms like “buy” or “reviews” are in a buying mood. So, we can change up the keyword phrase a little