by Rebecca Mikulin

Created on: June 24, 2010

Before building a new site and/or bringing it online, it is imperative to do keyword research in order to optimize your search rankings. In addition, good keyword research can help you find a new angle for the information on your site in order to differentiate yourself from the potentially thousands or even millions of websites that have similar subjects. That’s all well and good, but how do you get started?

The first thing to know when you’re doing keyword research is what you’re looking for. While this is obviously a very fundamental part of your research, many people still end up charging off blindly into the world of keyword statistics without having any idea what those numbers or ranges mean. Namely, you want to find keywords that have search traffic sufficient for your goals, but have minimal competition. Alternatively, many people choose a single keyword that is extremely popular, but has a lot of competition, and then combine it with less-competitive keywords in order to broaden the possibilities for that site being found. Additionally, the traffic that comes in for those less-popular keywords can help boost the page rank of the site, allowing it to also rank higher in the very popular keyword’s search results.

There are hundreds of tools available for doing keyword research that will show how often a keyword is searched for, as well as how many other sites already exist that use that particular keyword, or how many high-quality results that search already gets. Some of these tools are hosted by actual search engines and may only show search result numbers from their own search engine. Try to use the tool that is the closest to your target as possible. For instance, if you think that most of your traffic will be coming through Google, then using the keyword tool through Google AdWords will likely give you the most accurate information for your goals.

Now you have to actually find potential keywords for your website. While most of these tools will give suggestions for a given word or phrase, there are literally millions of different ways people phrase searches and so there may be a lot of missed opportunities if you don’t go in with as many items to look up as possible. Consider the purpose of your site. Is it to sell a particular product, or promote a particular interest? List some of the things you think people would type into a search if they were looking for your site. Brainstorm…use bad grammar, common misspellings,

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