How to brainstorm brilliant keywords

How to brainstorm brilliant keywords

Talk to me about the 'thought process' that goes into coming up with brilliant, high ranking keywords for a website. For instance, do you make actual lists of keywords for your niche? Are you using a thesaurus and just research common synonyms or related words? Do you take the words from your competitor's site, such as by peeking at the source code? I remember back in the day, that last suggestion was very popular and I'll admit that I did that a few times

And, possibly this is a niche specific question.

After all, if you have a recipe blog, all your keywords are going to be surrounding recipe/food related.

What about focusing on user intent as a way to generate new long-tail keywords? If a person wants to learn or do something, they will typically search for a 'how to, so that's their intent.

For instance, when a gardener searches for answers to gardening related questions, they won't just be searching for 'gardening' as that's too vague. So their search might be 'How to make marigolds grow fast in any soil?' I have read a little about user intent as it relates to keyword strategy but want to know more. I think it's a goldmine for coming up with keywords.

Possibly if you could generate a list of commonly asked questions for your niche, then that would become the basis of your keyword list.

And, maybe those questions could be integrated into a page along with highly detailed answers, much like you have with our own SEOClerks FAQ or even Yahoo Answers or any of the other big Q & A sites.

That's just one thought on coming up with really good/relevant keywords and I'd love to hear more if you know how to use this 'user intent' for keyword strategy along with some actual examples as well as any other big out of the box keyword brainstorming ideas.