If you are not targeting the right keyword for your target web audience then your business is going nowhere. The basic and the foremost step in any SEO strategy has to be keyword research and analysis. There are certain steps to doing keyword research for your website.

Brainstorming

You need to sit down and actually make a list of terms and phrases that you would like to type in on search engines relevant to your niche. The key here is that you need to think like an average Joe who is not aware of the site, only thing you have is a query. This brainstorming will give you a list of phrases or basic search terms that would be put in by your target audience when they are searching.

Visitor Analysis

This is the second step after brainstorming, which will give you further insight to the keywords and phrases that need to be targeted. Moreover, it will also enlighten you about the visitors interests and what they look for on your site. The analytics of your site or blog will point which web page the readers visit the most and where they spend their maximum time.

For doing visitor analysis, you can use free programs like Google Analytics. It will give you a deep insight about the traffic to your site. This will help you to fine-tune the keywords that you have generated by brainstorming. You can eliminate or add a few depending upon the results of visitor analysis.

Online Keyword Research

Now is the time to find the actual list of keywords related to your site and target audience. For this there are many online tools, both free and paid. But the best is the Google’s Adwords Keywords Tool. The reason being that Google commands about 70% share in the online searches made worldwide. So the results shown by Google will be more reliable.

You need to simply put the terms you have generated in the previous two steps in to the keyword research tool. The result will be a list of keywords that are searched along with the search volume and competition.

Choose Long Tail Keywords

It would be better for your site to target the long tail keywords in the long run. Single word or highly popular phrases have very large competition. Long tail keywords are nothing but a combination of two or more related keywords for a given niche.

This article provides a very comprehensive keyword research strategy for SEO. Once you have identified the keywords, next step is to create content for them.