by Daniel Xiao Wang

Created on: June 24, 2010

Keyword research is one of the most important and valuable activities that can be done for on line marketing. Proper Search Engine Optimization and keyword research is one of the highest return activities in the world of on line marketing. Nothing else will boost PageRank and drive traffic to your site faster than using the proper keywords and utilizing SEO. Assuming, of course, that the content of the site is relevant and informative.

When conducting keyword research the goal is to find the keywords that clients are using that are relevant to your website. Ideally, a web marketing strategy will search for and determine the keywords that clients will search for that will lead them to your site.

In order to conduct keyword research there are several steps:

Find potential keywords. What you are doing here is identifying several words that clients may use to describe what your product or service is about. You will want to include as many synonyms as possible and try to include everything you can think of that someone searching the web may use.

Google Adwords has a great keyword suggestion tool that can help with this. 

Once you have an exhaustive list of potential keywords, go through and eliminate the ones that are not directly relevant to you. Remember that the information on your site needs to be relevant. If a client is looking for cat food and your site sells only dog food attracting that client to your site is a waste of time for both of you.

Don't forget the long tail! People search for all manner of things online. The highly popular keywords that appear to be the most searched represent about 30% of the search engine searches. That other 70% is the “long tail” those less competitive keywords that are not searched nearly as often but that people do search for to find their answers. Only focusing on highly competitive keywords will not likely drive new business to your site. You may get lucky, but a good combination of high, medium, and low competition keywords is much more likely to bring you new business.

Divide the keywords into complimentary groups. After selecting a group of keywords, with varying degrees of competitiveness, many of them will probably be similar. Try to focus your content creation into groups revolving around similar keywords. For example, if several of your keywords are about healthy dog food, develop content specifically on healthy dog food and combine those keywords into your web copy.

At the end of this exercise you should be able to determine what keywords will lead a client to your site and what groups of keywords can work together for the actual content of your site. Remember that the best keywords mean nothing if the content of your site is not relevant to the person visiting. While Keyword research and strong SEO are vital, content is king.

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