There are many, many ways to find good keywords for your websites. Some of the ways are very expensive, some are free. Usually you have to use several methods to get a really good list of keywords for your niche.

One method that works well is to analyze the top sites in your niche. Or to put it another way, to analyze the sites in your niche that already rank well in the search engines. By analyzing them, you can determine which keywords they are using, and find related keywords to make your website even better!

Here are step by step instructions for using this method:

1. Go to Google and Yahoo, etc., and do a search for your general niche. For example, if you were building a website about the Nintendo Wii, you'd go to the search engines and search for Nintendo Wii (do not use quotes in your search).

2. Copy the URL's for the sites that show up with the top search results. To start with, you could at least grab the #1 site at both Google and Yahoo. In this case the top site at both is Nintendo's site, so I'm going to look for the first non-manufacturer site as well and grab that. (I don't use Wikipedia links for this method so I skip those.)

3. Okay so the first non-Nintendo link for the Wii from Google and Yahoo are http://www.cnet.com/nintendo-wii.html and http://wii.ign.com/.

4. Go to Google's Keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

5. When it asks how you want to generate keyword ideas, choose the option for "Website Content."

6. Paste in the first URL you copied from step #2 and click to get keyword ideas. Now you get a long list of keywords.

7. Repeat for each of the URLs. You can do this for as many of the URLs that show up on page #1 at Google and Yahoo as you like.

8. From the keyword phrases you have generated (and using Google's indicators for search volume as a guide) narrow down the list to a group of keywords you think you might want to focus on.

9. Go to free Wordtracker http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and lookup each of the keyword phrases. Note the search volume and look for related keywords that Wordtracker suggests that might be promising. Narrow your list down to keywords that are being used (if a keyword comes back with a low search volume then not many people are typing it into the search engines).

10. Repeat step #10 at free Keyword Discovery: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

11. You should now have a narrowed down list of keywords that Google, Wordtracker, and Keyword Discovery suggest and say have decent search volume.

12. Next go to Google and search for each keyword phrase within quotes. This tells Google to only find sites that contain the exact keyword phrase. Look for the number of pages that is returned. The lower the number, the easier you will be able to get a top ranking for your site in the search engines. I try to stay with keywords with under 10,000 competitors. Anything under 5,000 is even better. Throw out any keywords that have high competition, or at least move them to a secondary keyword list (you can use them on pages, but they won't be your primary keywords).

Now when using these keywords, don't just use them on your website. Use the keywords you find to write articles, post to niche related forums, write a blog about your niche, etc. Just remember to create quality content. After all, search engines are used by real people, and websites are read by real people... so make sure to create content around the keywords that is unique, informative, and something a real person would actually want to read.

I've just demonstrated a free method you can use to analyze the top sites in your niche for keyword ideas. However as you saw in the video, it is quite a lengthy process. It took me nearly 10 minutes just to show you how it's done for only one keyword, and that included the fact I had performed all of the searches in advance.

If you want to speed things up, you might want to give the following premium keyword research tools a try:

I personally use each of the premium keyword research tools listed above, however you don't have to pay for keyword research tools to find quality keywords for your websites. I choose to use the premium tools simply to save time and for the convinience, but I could do all of my research for free (using methods like I outlined above) if I needed to.

If you can afford to purchase any of the premium keyword research tools, they're worth the investment for the time savings and efficiency alone. However if you can't afford or justify the expense, this free method of analyzing top sites in your niche to generate keyword ideas should work well for you.

Additional information can be found at Jon's Affiliate Marketing Blog.