Keyword research should be a cornerstone of your online business. Unfortunately many online business people have no idea what keyword research is, how to do it, and how to use it to their advantage. Once you figure out what good keyword research is, you will easily see its importance in your marketing strategy.



The first step in keyword research is to understand how keywords work. When someone comes online looking for information they usually go to a search engine and enter a word or phrase related to what they are looking for. Once entered, this query will produce a list of sites related to the word or phrase they have entered.

Generally the first listing will get about 40% of the people who do the search to click on it. The goal of keyword research is to have your site come up number one in the search engine for words related to your site that people are actually using to search for information.

Finding Relevant Keywords

When choosing keywords you want to make sure you are finding words that are related and relevant to your content. If you keywords have nothing to do with your site you will never rank in the search engines. For example, if your site is about dogs you do not want to go after keywords like credit card, or internet marketing. They are both very profitable keywords, but have no relevance to your site. You want to find keywords that are directly relevant to the content on your pages.

To come up with good keyword ideas think about what you want your site to be known for. Are you the best place to find organic dog food? If so, you may want to do some research around the term dog food, and organic dog food. You also can think about what your site offers. If you offer information about a certain kind of jewelry or bracelet, you would want to do some research to find good keywords related to jewelry and more specifically the type of bracelet you offer. Try to find keywords as closely related to what your site offers. If you find those they will be more likely to convert to sales.

What makes a good keyword.

Internet marketers throw around the term good keywords all the time. It can be very frustrating for a new online business person, who just doesn't really know what that means. A good keyword is a word or phrase that is relevant to your site, that actually has people looking for it, and is not too competitive so you can actually rank for it in the search engines.

How do you know people are searching?

This is where many people fall down in keyword research. They come up with relevant terms to use for keywords but fail to see if anyone else is actually looking for that specific term. You want to make sure any keywords you choose have people searching for that exact term. You can use a number of tools to get this information. You can use wordtracker, and now even Google's Adwords Keyword Tool will show you search volume. Using Google's tool is smart because it's information straight from the largest search engine there is. You may ask, how many searches do I need? This is a good question and will certainly depend on your site, but you should definitely look for keywords with at least 50 "hits" a day.

How do I choose appropriately competitive keywords?

People used to just enter their keywords in Google and see how many competing pages there were. This is not a very effective way to check for competition. Anyone can put up a website, and when you just enter your keyword you are getting results from every site that mentions any and all of the words in your kewyord. You can start by entering your keyword in Google with quotes around it. This will give you the results for all the sites that have that exact phrase on their site. Even better just enter your keyword and check out the first page of sites. What kind of page rank do they have? How many links do they have coming to the site? These are the things you are going to be competing against them for, so it's wise to make sure you can beat the top sites.

As you can see keyword research can be a little intimidating, just because there's so much to it. However, once you get the basics of keyword research you can easily find profitable keywords for your site. Once ranked for profitable keywords your site will be getting targeted free traffic, which is what every online marketer wants.