This is the 7th post in the SEM Intermediate Series, a collection of posts intended for search engine marketing professionals looking for guidance in monitoring and adjusting the key performance indicators (KPIs) that determine the success of a PPC campaign.  This series is a continuation of the SEM Beginner Series.

When I talk to advertisers who are getting into the search space for the first time, one of the questions I hear most often is how to choose the best keywords for their campaigns and what to do with these keywords. This is actually a very, very good question, as choosing the right mix of keywords and grouping them correctly is essential to future success. With a fortified and well-chosen list of keywords as your base, making the most of your search campaign becomes that much easier.

There are 5 things any search-marketer should be doing to drive the best results with their campaigns, and it all begins with research:

· Keyword Research - the first step is to identify what keywords are most relevant to your brand and to your goals.

· Keyword Organization - grouping the keywords to organize them in a very specific and goal-oriented hierarchy.

· Keyword Analysis - figuring out what are the best keywords and making sure to give the most attention to those keywords.

· Negative Keyword Research - removing all keywords that could drive detrimental traffic to and attention to your brand.

· Ad Copy Research - using top keywords in conjunction with great calls to action to drive and deliver the most pertinent message for your brand.

For today's post, I'm going to focus on keyword research, the first of these 5 points; the other 4 will be addressed in subsequent posts SEM Intermediate Series posts here on the adCenter Blog.

Keyword research has been a hot-bed topic for search marketing gurus everywhere. Everyone has a different opinion and a preferred method that works best for them. I prefer to re-visit the goals of the particular campaign, and jot down notes on what is the overall structure that the keywords need to be a part of. If your goal is to drive users to a landing page that has information on multiple products, you are probably looking to create a robust and granular search campaign, and are better served having a large number of ad groups with ad group specific copy.

However, if your goal is to create a search campaign that is more generic and more brand-driven, it's often harder to come up with a keyword list that's focused and still offers enough traffic without going overboard; generic terms can be expensive!

I start out with some brand research: what do consumers think about my brand? Do consumers know about my brand? Doing a keyword search on Bing with my brand can provide great examples on who the competitors are and what consumers are likely to expect. For me, brand research also includes looking at competitor websites to determine what the key characteristics are that they are advertising, and jotting down some key phrases that stand out.

Let's say I'm the owner of Wingtip Toys. I know from doing a keyword search on Bing that while there isn't much competition on my brand for sponsored results, there's plenty of competition for the general keywords I want my ad to show up for.

Microsoft has some great tools to help with keyword research; my favorite one is Microsoft Advertising Intelligence. Do note, you will need to have Excel 2007 installed for the plug-in to work. It's well worth the effort to get Excel 2007 if you don't have it already.

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence allows you to quickly develop keywords that are essential to your search campaign. But beyond that, this tool also gives you the ability to organize those keywords in a way that is both meaningful and capable of driving the audience you're looking for through leveraging actual query data from Bing and taking into account various metrics, such as cost history, volume, and demographics.

One of the other tools I always end up using is the Ad Preview tool, that is built into adCenter. The Ad Preview tool allows you to search for and view the actual ads that are being served by adCenter against the keywords in your campaign. The best part of this tool is that not only can you view your own ad, but you can also see what other ads are serving for the keyword queried, giving you a very quick glimpse into the competition that exists as well as the types of ads your competitors may be utilizing. This can further help you to develop the right keyword structure and strategy for building out your campaign. To access the Ad Preview tool, you need to have a login for adCenter. If you don't have one, you can sign up here.

Using the tools that are already built into adCenter and Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, I am comfortably able to create successful search marketing campaigns. As long as I have a strong base (keywords) that match my goals, I can help drive the right audience to my product using search marketing.

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