Keyword Research

- The Foundation for a Profitable Website

Keyword research is the process of determining which keyword phrases will describe your website's products and/or services and are actually used in web searches. It is insight into the needs of your customers or clients. Bottom line it is finding out what Internet surfers are actually searching for.

Choosing keywords or keyword phrases can be very confusing for new site owners. If you don't have keyword or keyword phrases optimized on your web site, you will not get the traffic you want and individuals will not stay on your site, read your information or buy you service or product.

Keyword research can be broken down into a three step process.
The first step is the discovery phase. In this step you want to focus on identifying as many keywords or phrases as possible after you have researched your niche market.

Initially you need to sit down and brainstorm a list of keyword/keyword phrases that address the topic of your web site. Have a dictionary and thesaurus handy. At this point include every word or phrase that you can think of.

The second step is the analyzing phase. This step involves analyzing the popularity and competition for the keyword phrases. The quickest way to perform the analysis is to use one of the fee based keyword tools like Wordtracker or Keyword-Research Center

The third step is the selection of keyword phrases. From your analysis phase, you should be able to identify a number of high quality keyword phases that can accurately describe the qualities of your website.

In your final selection of keyword phases you need to look for phrases that have a high level of search activity, while the level of competitiveness is relatively low. For making your final selection of keyword phrases you will want to do a Google search on the keyword phrases and view the top web sites listed for each phrase. Are the sites professionally designed? Can you design a web page that can move up into the top ratings for this keyword phrase? These are all important questions to ask.

When starting a new web site it's highly recommended to target only one unique keyword phrase per page. With your newly researched keyword list you can write your content with a balanced use of unique phrases that will help generate traffic to your web pages.