People often ask me where is the best place to gather your keyword lists. It depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are building a list for your SEO strategy you don’t need a list of hundreds of keywords. If your building a list for your Pay Per Click campaigns and wanting to target thousands of keywords then something www.wordtraker.com or www.keyworddiscovery.com may do the trick. You can also use a program like Keyword Elite  which is fine for small projects. When building a list for SEO i believe that the best source of keywords is Google. As you re most likely optimising for Google anyway what better source is there? For a site that already exists this is easier than If are starting from scratch and if you already run a Google ad-words campaign and track the results with analytics it become evan easier as you will probably already have enough data to pick your keyword list. If your site is brand new and you don’t have an Google Adwords account should should sign up to adwords to get access to the google adwords tool or use something like Keyword Elite.

From Google Ad-words you can run a keyword report on all your keywords to date. Make sure you set the time frame to “all time”. You can then download the file as a .csv or in an xsl format. Don’t worry if your keyword list is not that comprehensive as we will build it out later.

From the list rank each of the words from one to three based on which of the terms are most relevant to your site. You may also want to pay close attention to the CTR (ad impressions to clicks %) as the higher clicked through keywords will generally be the words that users find more relevant to your website which is very useful information. You can also take a look in analytics at that keywords and see how long visits where for that keyword. Normally the longer the visit the more relevant the user found the keyword to your site. If you have goals or events set up in analytics take a look at which keywords result in goals.

If you think your list is light on take the top keywords you ranked at 1 and 2 and feed them in the the google keyword tool in ad-words. Once you have more keywords download them into a spread sheet and repeat the ranking process. Note that google will also give you the search traffic for each keyword. Although the don’t give you exact search numbers they are still very useful when selecting your keywords.

Now you have a basic keyword list in the next blog we will take a look at how to implement them to your site.