It Just Like a foundation to get a building, there is certainly one aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that is certainly more important than another. Without this foundation, you could be wasting all of your time and resources. Proper niche research should be the basis of your optimization.
Why is Keyword Research Critical?
Keyword research determines which keywords you have to be targeting using the SEO. Most people think that they know which keywords they need to target. Instinct can be quite a great resource, nonetheless it can also be misleading and is also almost always insufficient. For example, 'search engine marketing' gets nearly 16,000 searches every day while 'search engine marketing' gets approximately 8,800 searches each day. If your gut lets you know to target 'search results marketing', you may get great rankings, but it would only allow you to get half of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for 'seo'. There are also keywords that you could not be able to rank well for with no lot of time and significant amount of backlink building regardless of how well you optimize your website. In addition, there are keywords that others will use find what your site offers that you would never even think of. So, together with letting you know which keywords will be more popular, the study can also provide new keywords to focus on.
Drawing on the analogy inside our search marketing parable (found about the Church Marketing Online blog), optimizing your web site without first doing keyphrase research is like attempting to pick apples coming from a tree without first checking to see if you will find any apples on it or if the apples are inside your reach. You could end up putting in lots of effort but going home with little fruit out of your labor. So it's really a key component of search engine marketing.
What Do I Research?
There are two main aspects to niche research. The first is popularity, the frequency of which are keywords actually searched for. Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo, and MSN don't share the particular number of pursuit of specific keywords; however, you'll find a few tools online which are generally regarded as pretty accurate and Google does offer a free tool that provides the 'approximate' quantity of searches for some keywords. The keyword popularity tools (aside from Google's) utilize search data from your number of other smaller engines like google along with a few algorithms to predict how many searches are made for specific keywords. It's not perfect, nonetheless it gives you a solid idea of which keywords are most widely used. Since Google's figures come from'well'Google, they may be probably the most accurate, but even their figures are merely estimates and I've found that numerous keywords return a 'Not enough data' result. You may decide to use both Google and another keyword popularity tool.
The second aspect to keyphrase research is competition research. Competition research begins with analyzing your internet pages to determine how competitive your web site is at general as well as for specific keywords. This is sometimes called page strength. I should note that you'll find really two aspects to page strength, the general strength of the site and also the specific strength of a page inside site. For the sake of simplicity, in this article I use 'web page' for both. The next step is to look at the keywords themselves to determine how competitive they're. This is sometimes called keyword difficulty. Determining keyword difficulty is performed partially by examining how competitive the pages are that rank well with this keyword, though other methods can be helpful as well. This can be tricky for 2 reasons.
1. No one besides that search engine designers knows how each google search determines how competitive a website or page is and also the search engine folks aren't talking.
2. Each google search has a different way of determining how competitive a niche site or page is. So, even if you could determine one, it can't necessarily be so while using other search engines.
Despite these difficulties the search engines like yahoo do provide us with some general details about what makes web pages competitive (what determines page strength). I'll look more into how we determine keyword competition in my next article.
Without good keyphrase research, your search engine optimization efforts is going to be like firing a gun into the dark. You may hit something, you may not. You may choose keywords which might be not looked for or keywords that are way too competitive for your website at that time. It's best to know what you have to be targeting.
Keyword Research Critical in Building Better SEO
