If you have been involved in making money online for more than a couple of years, you will remember that as recent as 2 years ago all that was needed for market research was to find a program that could generate mass amounts of keywords for you. You really did not care too much about anything except getting the biggest list possible.  

Today, that is a risky and ineffective way to go. The search engines are getting smarter all the time and their goal is to serve their customers the absolute best search results they can. In order to achieve this, they have hired incredibly talented people to help them design complex algorithms that allow them to automatically filter out good sites from bad sites. They are not 100% perfect at this but they are getting better all the time.

One of the more recent technologies that have been getting a lot of attention is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). What this technology (algorithm) does is it tries to imitate the thinking process of a human visitor to do its best to determine if the results of their query are relevant to what the person would be searching for. So when looking at a web page, it would look at the content from a perspective of how a human conversation would take place.  


The human language relies on a lot of assumptions and generalities. When you read the
second phrase, you understand that there is a red car but you are not beat over the head with the keyword phrase itself. Those other terms are terms that are
commonly used with the primary term or topic of the conversation, which means they are related.
This strategy has had its time and place, but in the last year alone, many improvements have occurred (especially in Google with LSI) and this strategy is becoming less and less
effective. 
Content needs to be focused on themes and created like a conversation. You need to not focus in on one single word, but instead focus on the theme for the topic and what conversations occur around that theme. With the use of LSI, (which we believe Google is some what using) Google is better able to determine the relevance of a website by quickly comparing its content to that of existing websites that they consider trustworthy. 

So if your web page does not contain the verbiage that is frequently associated with the subject matter of related sites, then the that website will not be considered to be part of that theme or market, which is not good from a long term rankings perspective. 

So when you start your market research you need to keep this in mind. We are not looking for those magic individual keywords, we are not doing keyword research but we are doing is Market Research.