keyword researchers

I like to ask my keyword researchers to follow:
(a) use a keyword research tool like Wordtracker to come up with an initial líst of 1000 keywords by using the seed keyword I described in step 1 above.
(b) manually go through that líst and select only the highly-relevant keywords according to the context I described in step 2 above. This probably pares the líst down to 50 or so.
(c) for each of the 50 keywords on this shortlist, individually go to Google and type each keyword in to the search engine and look at the top 10 search results.
(d) for each of these top 10 search results (for each of the 50 keywords), go to Marketleap and type in each of the web pages and record the number of inbound links in a spreadsheet. It isn't important to record the URL's of each of the competitors, just their search result rank.
Now, if this sounds like a tedious manual chore, it is! This is why it is a favorite task to outsource. Chances are, if you're stuck doing it yourself, you'll take shortcuts or just not do it at all. Far better to outsource this to a reliable keyword researcher who will follow directions and produce the output you request.
At the end of the day, you need to know which keywords to target and there is only one way to get this information: diligent research. Outsource this properly, and you are well on your way to better search engine ranking for your website.