Keyword Research SEO

Keyword ResearchKeyword research is probably the single most important task that you will undertake with regards to your Internet marketing. Long before getting to work creating your website you will need to identify your target market. If you are experienced in the world of business you may well already understand this concept as the identification of the people you will try to sell your product or service. When it comes to marketing a website there is another vital layer that is just as important, to research your target keywords.

Keywords play an important role within Internet marketing as they help identify a particular topic or niche for a given web page or resource; for example if you were to pay to advertise your website on other sites on the web, you may well only want your advertisement to appear on pages related to the product or service that you offer. Most advertising agencies allow you to target your ads to specific keywords. If we wanted to advertise our car parts website we might opt for targeting sites that contain the word "car", "car parts", "motor parts" etc.

When developing your own website, keywords play an even bigger role. As most web traffic originates from search engines it would make sense to make our website perform as well as possible within these search engine result pages for people looking for our type of product or service, and the key to this is proper keyword research.

The first step is to identify the top words and phrases that not only relate to your services, products, business or brand, but those phrases that users are likely to actually type into a search engine when looking for the type of products or services that you offer.

Start by identifying two or three top keyword phrases that are used to search for your type of website. A keyword may be a single word, e.g. "cars", or contain several words, often referred to as long tail keywords, e.g. "Used car parts". Targeting long tail keywords is usually more effective as they have a more refined scope combined with less competition.
If your type of business is location based, as in our previous pizza delivery example, you would most certainly want to include your location (city, town, county etc.) among your targeted keywords.

All of your selected keywords must be related to your business or niche. The use of unrelated keywords within your web pages can cost you penalties in the search engines and also make your site look spammy and unprofessional.

Taking some time to get this right from the start will pay significant dividends and put your business on the fast track to Internet success.





Want to know more?  This article is a excerpt from our popular SEO Book: DIY SEO & Internet Marketing Guide, available in both Print and eBook format from Amazon.
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