Keyword research: What's your strat? here's mine...

So because of the generous BHW, I am able to have Market Samurai. I watched the videos and am able to find 'probable' keywords. (I say probable because I'm still trying to learn the metrics of MS for analyzing niches and keywords.) MS has their "golden rules", but I'm looking for a little less competition than what they push, and will settle for less traffic. A few thousand or more searches in a month is currently what I'm aiming at. But as indicated by my post count, I'm still wet behind the ears. I'm desiring to get into affiliate promotions but presently want to begin monetizing by Adsense.

SENuke has niche research but I haven't explored it, yet. I have mainly used SENuke to promote what I had previously found with MS. Anyone have any good experience with SENuke's niche research?

Then there are other niche identification programs and ebooks. Mao Flynn recently had a good method in "10 Steps to 10k", but that referred to niches that aren't cyclical or temporal. Do you like targeting keywords that have a time-sensitive nature to them?

I would be daft not to believe that some of the hardened marketers on here do their own research the 'long' way, e.g. without aid of current applications. I peruse postings all the time trying to uncover these methods.

What about wordtracker? Is Google Keyword Tool sufficient to this or is Wordtracker taking keywords to the next level? Thanks for checking this thread out, none-the-less.

MS is good for checking out the competition and for finding high search/low competition keywords. Another thing you can do is go to the very last page of the serp results for your keyword and look at the message at the bottom where it tells the actual amount of competing pages. Do not just look at the initial results that are shown on the first page. You should look at your keywords from many different angles and do not rely on any one tool to make your decision. imho.

wmoriarty said:

MS is good for checking out the competition and for finding high search/low competition keywords. Another thing you can do is go to the very last page of the serp results for your keyword and look at the message at the bottom where it tells the actual amount of competing pages. Do not just look at the initial results that are shown on the first page. You should look at your keywords from many different angles and do not rely on any one tool to make your decision. imho.

Click to expand...

Wow, thats actually something that I hadnt thought about doing before. I have a question for you guys as its on topic, there has been 2 schools of thought taught when checking out the competition, and doing Market Research:

A. Dont go after a Term that has over x amount of competing pages
and
B. Dont go after a term that the top 3 guys have over x amount of BLP's

Which do you guys think is a more relevant measure when doing research? Initially I was taught to not go after certain terms that had over a certain amount of competing pages, but later figured out that the competing pages really doesnt matter.

A good place to start is to find the number of competing pages.

IE: Type term "red swing sets" in to Google. Notice it only has 7 results?

This is a good indication that it is low competition. Then do in depth research with market samurai.

Go wild.