Selecting the right kinds of SEO keywords and keyword phrases is important. Get them wrong and you’re Vicky Pollard chatting with the Queen – you’re Lester Burnham on the pull, you’re Paul and Yoko. It’s not going to work out.

You need to talk in a language that your audience understands. More importantly you need to use the language they us – to share their ‘semantic space’. Smart keyword research gets right under the semantic skin, explores and identifies a whole range of useful words and phrases. Sure, there are the obvious generic terms that you can and probably should use but the chances are that they’ll be highly competitive on organic searches and highly expensive when it comes to PPC.

For real SEO breadth and depth you need to get lateral, to granularize. Spend little time exploring the crooks and nannies. See what they tell you.

They’ll probably suggest using Google Insights. It’s a great SEO tool. A way of quickly and easily identifying what terms are being searched for, when and where. It’s… insightful SEO. Google itself says –

‘With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. ‘

Have a play, check out this SEO Google SEO vid or take  a look at this excellent Google Insights tutorial

I did a quick search on the term SEO for 2010 and drilled down by location to find Manchester. Interestingly SEO Manchester comes out third ahead of SEO London. Possibly even more interestingly the top two locations were Bletchley and Brentford (anyone know why?).

Here are the top SEO search terms:

1. SEO Google
2. Web SEO
3. SEO UK
4. Website SEO
5. Free SEO
6. SEO London
7. SEO marketing
8. SEO tools
9. SEO WordPress
10. WordPress SEO

Even better than that Google Insights lists ‘Rising Searches’:

1. Google keyword +80%
2. Keyword tool +70%
3. Search engine optimization +70%
4. WordPress SEO plugin +60%
5. SEO tutorial +50%
6. Webmaster tools +40%
7. SEO checker +40%
8. SEO optimization +40%
9. WordPress +40%

Seek the keyword heat and make good things happen.

Do you use Google Insights? Thoughts?

Thanks to Triplezero for the Flickr image