I love to collect free PDF white papers, but I hardly ever read them. I made an exception for the recent release of “Keyword Research and Selection: The Definitive Guide to Gathering, Sorting and Organizing Your Keywords into a High-Performance SEO Campaign” by Stoney G. deGeyter (and Jason Green) of E-Marketing Performance and Pole Position Marketing.

“Keyword Research and Selection” is an excellent place to begin your keyword research. It offers good advice and best practices for keyword research. For example, “KRS” advises: “Don’t get locked into using the keyword phrase precisely as its most often searched, even if the stemmed variations show little search volume” (13).

Stoney and Jason address another attitude that I’ve encountered all too often: “Don’t promote terms on the basis of generating hits, instead promote terms on the basis of generating sales” (15). I know lots of legitimate SEOs (ie not crooks) who focus too much on high search volume keywords that will never convert.

The points I happen to disagree with in the text are pretty minor:

• ”When researching competition it is good to type 2 or 3 keywords at a time into the search field as this will furnish a list of competitors that are specifically targeting a similar audience” (16). It might be a way to identify larger competitors, but it’s also important to identify who each keyword’s specific competitors are. There may not be overlap, even in highly similar keywords.
• That aside, there isn’t enough on measuring the strength of competitor pages. If the top ten is dominated by Wikipedia, About.com, and other well-linked and vetted sites, cracking the first page is going to take a lot longer—and may or may not be worth it.
• “We like to organize our phrases in groups of five targeting no more than fifteen keywords per page” (19). Stoney and Jason do advise the reader to write naturally; I’m just not sure how “natural” a page targeting 15 keywords, no matter how closely related they are, can sound.