Keyword Research

Keyword research is the foundation of search engine optimization. If inappropriate keywords are chosen for a site, the remainder of the optimization process will be ineffective. Imagine a website that focuses on lunch meats optimizing for the keyword “peanut butter sandwich”. While this example may be a little extreme, it also illustrates the importance of good keyword research. There are 3 basic criteria to consider when seeking out appropriate keywords for optimizing a site:

• Keyword relevancy
• Keyword competition
• Keyword traffic

Choosing relevant keywords is half the battle. Just because the most relevant keywords have been discovered doesn’t mean that a site will gain instant rankings for those keywords. The amount of traffic that keyword receives in a given time period and its level of competitiveness also needs to be considered. A web design firm is going to have little success optimizing their site for the keyword “web design” if they’re expecting to see results in a reasonable amount of time. That keyword is just way too competitive because there are millions upon millions of sites already optimized for that keyword. The advantage of that particular keyword is that it is searched for heavily in Google and other major search engines.

The optimal solution when researching keywords is to find keywords that are searched heavily yet rear minimal competition (and are appropriate to the web site). Such keywords are not incredibly difficult to find with some of the keyword research tools on the web. In our lunch meat website mentioned above, a good key phrase to optimize for might be “turkey lunch meat”. The average search volume for this term is roughly around 1900 searches per month, and according to Google’s allintitle tool, there are about 130 sites with this keyword in their title tags. Relatively speaking, that very little competition for a reasonably well searched keyword.

Keyword research is vital to the success of an SEO campaign. It’s important to choose relevant keywords that are going to perform well in a reasonable period of time. Keyword competition and traffic are also of great significant. With a proper selection of keywords, a site can perform very well in the search engine rankings in no time at all.