Monday, February 05, 2007

Keyword Research – What is it?

When you are looking for help promoting your site, using keyword research may seem like a good idea. If you are just throwing up websites without incorporating professional niche keyword research into your site planning, content development and search engine optimization, you are truly taking a shot in the dark. Keyword research is the heart of any Search Engine Optimization task. Your keyword research will ultimately dictate how (and if) visitors find your site.

Keyword research is a very important help for any webmaster or writer to make use of the most relevant keywords and terms to help visitors find, what they need. You need to be extremely careful with keyword research so that you don't miss excellent opportunities or aim so broadly that you target phrases that will never rank well. Keyword research involves finding and grabbing the low hanging fruit. Doing proper keyword research needs both time and skill,

While doing keyword research it is always recommended to do a thorough market research and competitive analysis to find best keywords used by search engine visitors to find products and services online and what keywords your competitors who are doing well in online marketing target. You can spend a lot of money each and every month doing keyword research if you choose to have some one do this for you but this is not really necessary.


There are a number of free resources, that outperforms (once you understand how to do it) most of those paid keyword services. While anyone can learn to do their own keyword research and be very successful at it, like anything else it will take time and effort on your part to do it, and do it well. There are those who don’t want to take the time to learn all of those methods and for them, the paid services might be the right choice. One thing that is commonly available with the paid keyword research services is a group of peers to help steer your progress. You may also be able to find a paid keyword service if it’s in your budget where you can spend a couple of months using their service, learn as you go and once you are comfortable with the [process, venture out on your own.

Try to avoid doing what many have done and use KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) as the be-all-end-all solution to keyword research. While it is a very useful and important part of good keyword research, many have failed by taking a leap strictly based on KEI. You need to learn how to do your own keyword research, which will enable you to find keywords that don't have as much competition and at least a minimum 50 - 100 searches per month.


After you are done with your keyword research for search engine optimization and have developed a short listing of all your related phrases, it’s now time to find out about the competition involved with them. I would suggest that you try some free keyword research tools and start with a few seed words. While there are many keyword research sites to choose from, you may want to start with a basic, simple and free program first such the offerings such as WordTracker, Overture and other various free tools to assist you in keyword research.

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