What do you need to put an effective keyword list together? What sources should you look at, and how do you know when you have too many or too few? Let's look at a few rules to putting a healthy keyword list together.

About the first thing that any SEO expert will tell you about building a keyword list would be this - that you need to get your own market research done. When you put your keyword list together, you basically need to know how exactly people search to arrive at your website. Call in people - your friends, family, anyone - and ask them to search for product pages online and watch over their shoulder. Try to see what kind of keyword search phrases they tend to use. Those are the kind that you need to have on your keyword list.

Use a keyword suggestion tool like the one on Free keywords.wordtracker and Adwords.google.com/select/Keyword Tool External. When the topic you have in mind is a particularly nonspecific one - like 'electronics' or 'Christmas shopping' - the kind of keywords you can get from these tools can be particularly valuable. You can get lots of keywords for all the long tail terms (long tail terms are keywords to do with all the low demand items that might come under your main categories). And of course, you need to make sure that you never miss the current slang that's in use in relation to the keyword topics you have in mind and you need to take all the jargon into account too. For this, you need to take a different and experienced search marketer in the area you have in mind into confidence and ask for all the slang and jargon there might be to include in your list.

One of the most important lessons In keyword inclusion has to be to never forget that plurals and misspellings are often used by people who just happen to think that way, or who don't know any better. The best performing keyword lists are the ones that have all the common misspellings accounted for. In the end, make sure that you realize that keyword lists perform differently from month to month and from year to year. Something that didn't work well a while ago that work better today. If a client wants you to not include a keyword that just seems too expensive, often, they mean that they believe that it's too expensive for a keyword that doesn't really work.

In the end, be sure you never leave brand and product names and SKU umbers out of your keyword lists. Anyone searching with these terms is already quite ready to buy.