The best keywords

Keywords can be a gateway to leads and visitation to your website and then possibly sales. There are several ways to find good keywords and here is one way :

Step one: Use multiple sources to get keyword suggestions

The first thing that a lot of folks do is they only use a single source. They go to AdWords for example, or maybe they'll go to Suggest. Or possibly they'll start with SEMrush, which has an awesome corpus and database, but it's sort of based on a single source. My strong suggestion is a lot of the sources have only one type of data in them and you want to combine them.
The five or six that I really like are, first off, AdWords is a great source. They're, generally speaking, commercially focused terms. AdWords knows that people want to buy those keywords for pay-per-click search, and so they try and include commercial terms that people are actually going to convert on. They hide a lot of stuff that frankly Google feels like is not going to get people the conversions they're looking for, because the problem is if you buy the wrong keywords, you don't blame yourself for poor keyword targeting, you blame Google for sending you bad traffic. So AdWords has hidden some of those things. They'll show them to you if you type them directly in, but not otherwise.
Suggest, you can go to Google Suggest and in fact, Google related searches — which are at the bottom of the search versus the top in the bar as you type — those both give variance and/or searches that people who search for this also performed.
Then you'll see there are a lot of tools out there. SEMrush is by far the most popular one — and, in my opinion, a really, really good one, too — for a keyword to rankings graph. Essentially what this is saying is, "Here are keywords that the pages that rank for the keyword you gave us also rank for," or same thing at the domain level. It's creating and mapping those things so that you can get broader terms than you ordinarily would have with just these other methods. That's pretty cool.
Another one that's very, very cool and very sophisticated, that some SEOs are doing, is topic modeling-based keywords. This is essentially saying, "Hey, show me terms and phrases that co-occur on lots of documents, high quality documents hopefully, with the term or phrase that I'm targeting." You can find those through tools like AlchemyAPI. It's a little challenging to use, but there you go.
Bunch of tools, SEMrush and AdWords. You can use Google Search for a bunch of these. Ubersuggest to get some of those suggestions. KeywordTool.io actually has a number of these inside it. SpyFu is similar to SEMrush. AlchemyAPI helps you with topic modeling.

Then — somewhat self-promotionally, and I apologize for that — but Keyword Explorer, which Moz just launched this week and which we're pretty excited about. I was actually the product architect for that. So I'm feeling quite excited and very proud of my team. Keyword Explorer, shamelessly, has all of these in there. I think our topic modeling is actually a little better than AlchemyAPI's. I think our keyword to rankings graph is almost as good, maybe in some cases better, maybe in some cases not as good as what SEMrush has. We also get suggestion-related, real time, and then we obviously have a big corpus that we've got from AdWords too.

I use adwords to find good keywords, I also look at competitive websites to see what they are using. I like to think what I would type in to find myself and get a good long tail keyword.  So much more to this and I will add more next blog.

Joe Rossini