When I use the free google keywords tool, what exactly am I supposed to be looking at that makes a keyword really good? Let's say a keyword has 6,600+ local search volume with half of the advertisers bar filled. Does this make the keyword a good one to optimize for? Also, should I even bother with the ones that do not have enough data?
You should check first your site and than select the keywords, Decide your self which keywords are important for you and why than choose one of them. I hope you got it.
First look at the relevancy and then If your site is new then dont pick high competitive keywords to start instead you can have low competitive keywords so you can start getting traffic from those.. and then you can target for high competitive keywords...
It depends how you are going to market your site and how you are going to make money on your site. If its an adsense site and you are going to market with articles or something then you are looking for words with high advertiser competition, plenty of searches and expensive click prices.....Then go to google and check the competition, look for low competition and low strength of competition. If its a commercial site that you are going to advertise through adwords then you look for low advertiser competition and low click prices but high search amounts....Also pick extremely relevant keywords or your conversion is going to be bad. Its a lot of work to find good keywords but it has to be done, every internet marketeer has to find good, relevant keywords.
try to look for less traffic but effective keywords. Targeting over volume keywords may find you unable to generate enough traffic due to competition
for new blog, pick those keywords with less search volume in order to gain traffic. after some time, you can use the more competitive ones.
It's also important to note that you can't take those results seriously all of the time. I've seen it make some pretty weird mistakes. For instance, search for keywords like "a (put a word here)" and it will show that phrase is extremely popular, when you know it's not. I just searched for the keyword "a shoe" and it's showing that about 201,000 people search for that term per month.
Thanks for the responses, my site will be trying to make revenue off of adsense, and I think I've found some great keywords to optimize for.
Keyword Suggestion tools that you can use are: freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ keyworddiscovery.com/keywords.html tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ To be successful in getting the right keyword you should know the niche and the type business of your client. Think as if you're the owner and the visitors of the site. In this was you can come up with bright ideas in picking the right keywords for your site.