Keywords and Keyphrases Used In Search Engine Optimization ... Starting the search for keywords

My project was about water gardening. Obvious single keywords were:

Ponds
Pumps
Waterfalls
Fountains
Koi
Aquatics

And many others of a similar type. None of them however was much use as a good keyword because it was too general and made it more difficult for me to compete with other similar web pages. Nevertheless they were good starting points. Let us take the word ponds and build upon this by doing a bit of brainstorming. This is the kind of list I came up with ( do not worry about the capital letters):

Garden ponds
Fish ponds
Lily ponds
Koi ponds
Concrete ponds etc etc etc.

All contained the word ponds but were far more specific and probably were more like the phrases being used by real people searching the Internet for information and products associated with ponds. I then did the same with the word pumps and came up with a list like the following:

Submersible pumps
Low voltage pond pumps
Pond pumps
Waterfall pumps
Fountain pumps etc etc etc.

This list was becoming more useful BUT it was also becoming longer and longer.

Take note here: YOU DO NEED A LONG LIST OF KEYWORDS. If your keyword list is only 10 to 20 words you have done a pretty poor job of selecting important keywords. If you have 300 keywords then that is not too bad not very good mind you. I will show you how to automate this process to remove some boredom from the exercise. At the risk of overkill I must stress this keyword selection process is critical to success.

Potentially every keyword is the basis for a separate web page.

What? - 300 web pages you are saying ... My answer is yes maybe you do want to do 300 web pages but not all at once. So do not be put off yet. All will become clear. One thing I promise however is the more web pages you have the more products you will sell. This will become obvious and is another reason for being able to do web pages yourself.

If you asked a web designer to do a 300 page web for you he would want to charge you a fortune.

Here is a bit more motivation for you. How would you like to find keywords, and lots of them, being searched for every day and for which there is no competition or less than 10 thereby guaranteeing you a place on page 1 of Google even if your web site was the very worst ever designed? I hope you said yes quietly to yourself.

I have got my 300 keywords, what next?

You must now select the best keywords from this list of 300. To be able to do this you need the answers to two questions for each keyword:

Question 1: Are real people looking for this keyword and if so how many (referred to as POPULARITY)?
Question 2: How much competition in terms of web pages (SERPs) found on a search am I facing for this single keyword (referred to as COMPETITION)?

Keywords and keyphrases continued