Primary Keywords are the terms and phrases that immediately come to mind. These are often very general, high traffic and highly competitive keywords but are said to be the foundational themes of your advertising campaign.

Primary keywords are the most basic terms that describe your products, information and services. Depending on your overall advertising objectives, you may or may not want to include these core keywords in your keyword list; but primary keywords can be of big help when you first begin to think about how to advertise.

Come up with enough words to cover all the services your site offers. Avoid overly generic terms like “bags” or “clothes”. These words are incredibly difficult to rank for and would not drive qualified traffic to your site. Focus on words that are relevant, but not overly used.

After your initial list of Primary Keywords, you may start looking for more additions or what you call Keyword Variations and Modifiers. If primary keywords are the basic themes that help you build your initial keyword lists, keyword modifiers will help you home in particular customers.

You may find that many of these variations are related to your business in some way and may wish to include these in your keyword list. For example, an advertiser promoting laser skin treatment may find that variations on "pimples," such as "anti-acne cream" or "anti-pimple products," are relevant and should be included.

If an advertiser is trying to reach the appropriate audience for a designer "clothing" line, for instance, he may find using general keywords like "dress" alone ineffective. Combining these core keywords with modifiers such as "luxury," "high end," and "authentic" will help target an audience that is willing to pay top money for a high quality clothes, rather than a bargain hunter who is looking for a lower-end one.

Modifying keywords can also help you achieve the goals you defined for your advertising campaign. An advertiser selling electronics, for instance, may be focused more on sales and conversions rather than branding. The goal, then, is to distinguish shoppers who are closer to buying from those in the research stage of the sale cycle. One way to do this is to use conversion-oriented modifiers such as: "buy," "buying," "order," "ordering," etc.

You can also include specific brand names, product names, and even model numbers. Users searching on highly specific terms know exactly what they are looking for, and could be more likely to convert sales for you.

Take a look at your website ’s hit logs (also called access logs). You may not realize it, but most logs show you the keywords that people used when they clicked a link to your site at a search engine (You probably need another program, if your logs do not contain the said information). Jot down the keywords that are bringing people to your site.

More or less you know who your competitors are, you should and you must. Go to their sites and open the “source code” of the pages of their sites (Simply click “View Source” from the browser’s menu bar to get a peek). Look for the <META NAME=”keywords”> tags and check for useful keywords.

Go for harmonized brainstorming sessions – talk to your colleagues, friends or staff to see if they can figure out possible keywords for your online business. Start by giving them copy of your current keyword list and ask if they can think of anything to add to it. Doing this will surely spark an idea or two, but you will surely end up with few more terms which will add to the effectiveness of your keyword advertising strategy.

It is a general theory yet a common misconception that the more keywords you bid, the better. Well theoretically you will drive more traffic to your site but it will not be relevant or can bring a good volume of “quality visitors.” Start with your base group of keywords and expand on those. This will not be a one time process, it will be constantly, it will be constantly evolving. This is another reason for the importance of keyword level tracking. It gives you the ability to expand on words that are performing well, they maybe unexpected words that initially would have not made your list.

Ten to twenty percent of all searches compose of misspelled words, that is why checking spelling mistakes is incredibly important. For example, one out of five persons has the tendency to misspell the surname of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another is the word calendar which is also frequently misspelled into calender, calander and calandar. One nice thing about misspellings is that often competitors have missed them, so you can grab the traffic without much traffic.

Similar words are easily missed. If you have a pet shop business, for instance, have you thought about the terms puppy and kitten as synonyms for the words dog and cat? Others may easily overlook those words, using cat and dog instead, but other prospective net users may also use such synonyms. Thus, enters the need for a thesaurus to search for synonymous words.

Learn to split or merge words for most people search using two words. For instance, your product name is “hardware” – but some net searchers will type it “hard” and “ware.” Also, lots of words are employed in two ways. Some use the term “database” as one word, while others would type it separately, which is “data” and “base.” Both terms should be on your list if you are to consider all searchers.

To ensure that you are not missing out on relevant traffic, be sure to include both singular and plural variations of your keywords. Search engines treat singulars and plurals differently. For example, searching on “book” and “books” provides different results, so it’s important to gauge which term is searched for most often.

Most search systems are not case-sensitive, so you need not worry about upper versus lower case of keywords. For instance, it does not matter if you use BOOK, book or Book.

Do you have hyphenated keywords on your list that could be used without the hyphen, or vice-versa? Some terms are commonly used both ways, so find out what your customers are using because search engines treat them as different searches. For example, the terms “T shirts” and “T-shirts” are fairly evenly split, where net over 50% of net searchers using the latter term. Meanwhile, the term “e-mail” is far less frequently used, with “email” being the popular spelling.

Geography will help you home in on a particular clients or customers. Are you selling clothes in the city of Paris or cosmetics in London? Do not forget to include the geographical coverage of your business such as city, state, other nearby states, and so on.

If your business or company is a well-established or well-known one, add that to the list, in whatever permutations you can think of. Example: Microsoft, MSoft, MS, MSFT etc.

Scan through your keyword list and look for ambiguous or confusing terms – phrases that would not do any good for various reasons. Such words may convey different meanings to different people. Example is the term “cam,” which is for medically inclined people would mean “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” while for majority of net users would mean as the short term for “camera.” It is then advisable for a camera dealer or seller to utilize the term “cam” while it is an ambiguous term for those in to alternative medicine business for it would not generate quality clients.

After building your initial keyword list, the next step is to use a keyword tool. This tool will help you discover terms and phrases you failed to think of and will let you identify which keywords are effective and which are not. Both free and paid versions of keyword tools are available, but to cut the chase, nothing beats the use of KeywordSpy as it is today’s most advanced keyword tool.

A keyword tool will also help you narrow your list to only include highly attanable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site. In the early days of Search Engine Optimization, gauging the effectiveness of keywords was done by performing a search for that phrase in one of the various search engines and checking how many results will turn up. This was a tedious and proven to be an ineffective method of keyword research. Fortunately, times have change and we now have KeywordSpy to do the hard part for us. By inputting your proposed keywords to KeywordSpy, you can quickly learn the PPC Ranking, Ad Ranking and Competitor Count of such terms and phrases.

You've created your list, checked it twice, made friends with KeywordSpy and now off to go plan your attack. You're done, right? Unfortunately, no. As your customer's and your site's needs change over time, so will your keywords. It's important to keep monitoring your keywords and make tweaks as necessary. Doing so will allow you to stay ahead of your competition and keep moving forward.

Good luck!