Keyword Research, Feels like my head is about to explode in 1.2...

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Hello fellow Mozzers!

I've been reading quite a few books and forums on SEO for past few years. Finally a few weeks ago I decided to dive into SEO a lot more seriously and start building and optimizing our ecommerce site. We sell brand name servers, workstations, storage and related replacement and upgrade parts for them. I've read many articles, browsed all the popular SEO forums, watched SEO training videos religiously. I'm happy to say that I now (more or less) understand how to optimize a site/page for SEO (On page optimization, unique content/blogging, link building, social sharing, off page optimization, etc...) However the biggest challenge I'm have with is Keyword Research (which I think is the first and most crucial step). I can't seem to find a tool that will help me find good keywords/phrases that I can target in my business profile. Since its an ecommerce site, and we have about 2500 products which means about 2500 pages. the good thing about product pages is that there are part numbers which get searched quite often so I have no problem with selecting keywords for product pages, however for the home page its a NIGHTMARE. I searched the word "server" in Google keyword tool, and it shows that it has 40,000,000 monthly global searches with low competition. That's great news (right? high search volume, low competition) However when I google server or servers, the 1st page is filled with sites like: Dell, HP, IBM, Wikipedia, and a few more with a very high domain authority and thousands of links. So I'm assuming trying to target "servers" as my keyword for the homepage is probably a bad idea, correct?

When I google "buy server" i get mostly irrelevant content like "how to start a calling card business, a few articles(also irrelavant).

I guess my question is this: Can you please provide some advice or information on the keyword research articles and/or tools you use? Something that would provide relevant keywords based on a main keyword. Or am I not using the Google Keyword Tool properly

I also checked out our main competitors site to see which keywords they use, to get an idea, but when trying to google the keywords they're targeting they're not being displayed on Google for those keywords on the first few pages.

We are almost done building our new site which will have a few tools like online server configurator, Q&A section, Server Talk (Forum), Quick Product Finder(Suggests products based on entered criteria) and a few more Which  most of our competitors don't have, and I pretty much have an idea on which keywords to use for those pages and sections of the site, but I am completely clueless on the keywords to use for the home page.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Also forgot to add, should I just use the company name and a few simple keywords for the home page like servers, buy servers and then write weekly or biweekly article that are server related like Does a small business need a server? How do I choose a server for my business? Should I upgrade my server or buy a new one? Do I collocate or host in-house? Should I virtualize my server? Obviously adding links to products and services within these articles and try to create brand awareness that way?

[igor.pinchevskiy]

I might of answered my own question. Dan Price suggested using HubSpot Videos to learn a little bit about marketing in this post, I've bookmarked it but haven't had a chance to go through it... So in my own search I started going through all my notes, books, videos, and bookmarks. Take a look at this video from hubspot which gives a pretty good example on keyword strategy. I think it cleared everything up for me.