Keyword Research - Get Down To The Basics

Keyword research tips, eBooks, software, videos and articles are all over the web. With all this information available to us it is no wonder that we become overwhelmed. Just take a look at the keyword tools software with their push button this and push button that. You have seen it before haven't you statements like this tool will get you all the keywords that people are searching for on Google in a matter of minutes then you will be driven an abundant amount of traffic to your website.

Never the less keyword research is actually a very important part of marketing your business website online. There are a few simple basic rules to understand and follow to achieve this from the outset.

1. Knowing the intent of the searcher: First off you have to know and understand your customer in that is in your target market. The aim of this is to connect your customer to the phrases that they are liable to search with. Spending time in this process will help when selecting your targeted keyword.

2. Now dig right in and go and study the competition and find out what keywords they are using. Just pick say the top 12 that are in your targeted niche and save all of those keywords in an excel spread sheet for future use. If you are not familiar with the market you will have to spend time learning the language and terminology of the market. There a couple of free tools available to do this like the Google keyword tool and keyword spy.

3. The keyword research you are doing is all about people remember. Just think about the intent of the searcher when analysing these keyword phrases. Some of these searches will be from people that are not your target market. So really think hard about the keyword phrase. What was the real intent of that searcher when using a particular phrase? Negative keywords also come into play with searching but that is a large topic to cover in this article.

4. Search Volume comes into play a little bit and it depends a lot on how strong the market is. If go into one of those extra big popular markets then the higher the volume of searches the harder and most times it is impossible to rank for. If you have main stream big companies that have large authority sites with many pages then those keywords you have to stay away from as it will be imposable to rank with them.

As you can see there is quite a lot involved when it comes to keyword research but as you go through the processes you will soon get the hang of it. A lot of common sense comes into play with keyword phrases and knowing what your competitors' are using is one of the crucial elements of the whole process.

View the original article here