If you are building a website, or plan on building one you will probably want it to be seen at some point. The mantra, “IF you build it they will come,” does not apply to building and publishing a website on the Internet. In order to get visitors to your site it needs to be promoted.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of ranking a website in the searrch engine results based on certain keywords. Since keywords are such an important part of SEO it makes the most important step in any successful SEO campaign keyword research.
Keyword research does not have to be rocket science. You can use a keyword suggestion tool and there are many available. The first tool you should be using, however, is your brain.
The best advice you can take is to just think like your visitors or customers would. Take a moment to think of all the phrases they would use to find your website on the Web. You would be surprised at how many you can come up with just doing this. A dozen or so words is all you need to get started. Those can form a basis for finding hundreds of words.
Once you have a list of words, you can use a keyword suggestion tool to expand the list. Google has a free tool you can use. You just copy and paste your base list in and it can return up to 800 similar phrases you can use.
In addition to the additional words, you can get some other good data from the tool. You can get data like search volume, competition, advertisers, and other valuable data.
Volume is how many people are searching for that phrase a month. At first glance, you would think you would only go after the words with high search volume and ignore the ones with none. The data isn’t completely accurate so you should not disregard the low volume words so easily. Furthermore, the high volume words may have a great deal of competition. If your site is just starting out, then it may not be in a position to go after these words.
Competition can tell you how many sites are optimized for those words. Again, this can be a good indicator on how you should tailor your strategy for search engine optimization.
Advertisers can tell you how many people are bidding on those keyphrases in the paid search engines. This is a useful gauge of competitiveness as well. Furthermore, if you are looking to put advertisements on your page, it can help deciding which phrases are worth optimizing for.
Keyword research is crucial for any website that is trying to make themselves visible in the search engines. Search engine traffic is one of the best forms of advertising available because it is highly targeted. Without proper keyword research, you could be missing out on these targeting opportunities. And, you could be building a site around a market that is not worthy of your time.