What is keyword research?

The process of uncovering and selecting the appropriate keywords for your site is called keyword research. Keyword research is the fundamental and most vitally important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign. If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines and your customers may never find you, resulting in lost dollars and meaningless rankings.

The keyword research process can be broken down into the following phases:

Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions

One of the most common misconceptions about conducting keyword research for a search engine optimization campaign is the belief that you already know which terms a surfer would use to find your site. The chances are that you don't. Not without first doing some research anyway. You may know what your site is about and how you, the site owner, would find it, but it's difficult to predict how a surfer would go about looking for it.

Phase 1 – Creating the list and checking it twice

The first step in this process is to create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorm all the words you think a surfer would type into their search box when trying to find you. This includes thinking of phrases that are broad and targeted, buying and research-oriented, and single and multi-word. What is your site hoping to do or promote? Come up with enough words to cover all the services your site offers. Avoid overly generic terms like 'health' or 'music'. These words are incredibly difficult to rank for and won't drive qualified traffic to your site. Focus on words that are relevant, but not overly used.

If you need help brainstorming ideas, ask friends, colleagues or past customers for help. Sometimes they are able to see your site differently than the way you yourself see it. Also take a peek at your competitor's Meta Keyword tag. What words are they targeting? How can you expand on their keyword list to make yours better?

Phase 2 – Befriend the keyword research tool

Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to concentrate your list to include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site. Keyword research tools are essential for seeing what users truly search for.

In the early days of SEO, measuring the "popularity" of your search terms was done by performing a search for that phrase in one of the various engines and seeing how many results it turned up. As you can imagine, this was a tedious and ineffective method of keyword research. Luckily, times have changes and we now have tools to do the hard part for us.

By inputting your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool, you can quickly learn how many users are conducting searches for that term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other important analytical information. It may also tune you in to words you had previously forgotten or synonyms you weren't aware of.

There are lots of great tools out there to help you determine how much activity your keywords are receiving. Here's a few of our personal favorites:

Overture Keyword Selector Tool: Overture's Keyword Selector tools shows you how many searches have been conducted over the last month for a particular phrase and lists alternative search terms. This is a free and useful tool.

Wordtracker: Wordtracker is a paid-use tool that lets you look up popular keyword phrases to determine their activity and popularity among competitors. Their top 1000 report lists the most frequently searched for terms, while their Competition Search option provides valuable information to determine the competitiveness of each phrase. This is very useful for figuring out how difficult it will be to rank for a given term. It may also highlight hidden gems that have low competition-rates, but high relevancy.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Google's keyword PPC tool doesn't provide actual search numbers for keywords. Instead, it displays a colored bar, giving users only an approximation. Still, it may be useful.

Google Suggest: Google Suggest is a great way to find synonyms and related word suggestions that may help you expand your original list.

Thesaurus.com: Again, another way to locate synonyms you may have forgotten.

We recommend keyword analyzer.

Keep in mind that you're not only checking to see if enough people are searching for a particular word, you're also trying to determine how competitive that phrase is in terms of rankings.

Understanding the competition tells you how much effort you will need to invest in order to rank well for that term. There are two things to pay attention to when making this decision: how many other sites are competing for the same word and how strong are those sites' rankings (i.e. how many other sites link to them, how many pages do they have indexed)?

While you're testing your new terms, you may want to do a little housekeeping and test the activity for keywords your site is already targeting. Keep the ones that are converting and drop the losers.

Phase 3 – Finalizing your list

Now that you have your initial list of words and have tested their activity, it's time to narrow down the field and decide which terms will make it into your coveted final keyword list.

The first step in narrowing down your list is to go through and highlight the terms that most closely target the subject and theme of your Web site. These are the terms you want to hold on to. Kill all words that are not relevant to your site or that you don't have sufficient content to support (unless you're willing to write some).

Create a mix of both broad and targeted keywords. You'll need both to rank well. Broad terms are important because they describe what your Web site does; however, they won't increase the level of qualified traffic coming into your site.

Targeted terms are often easier to rank for and help bring qualified traffic. They also make you a subject matter expert to the search engines, since the targeted terms strengthen the theme created with the broader phrases. Sticking with our example, targeted terms for your cowboy boots site may be "men's cowboy boots", "blue suede cowboy boots", "extra-wide women's cowboy boots", etc. Broad search terms may bring you the higher levels of traffic, but it's targeted, buying-oriented terms like these that will maximize conversions.

Phase 4 – Plan your attack

We typically recommend only going after one or two related keywords per page. Any more than that and you run the risk of diluting your page to the point where you rank for nothing. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming. Your content should never appear forced.

Your on-page content isn't the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:

Title Tag

Meta Description Tags

Meta Keywords Tag

Headings

Alt text

Anchor Text/ Navigational Links

Phase 5 - Repeat.

As your surfer's and your site's needs change over time, so will your keywords. It's important to keep monitoring your keywords and make tweaks as necessary. Doing so will allow you to stay ahead of your competition and keep moving forward.

Good luck!