How to research the right keywords for your website

You want to select keywords that are popular and relevant to your site. However, you do not want keywords that return thousands of results, as it will be very difficult to get to the top of the rankings.Put simply, keywords are the words people type in to search engines when they search for something on the internet. Ideally, you should do your keyword research before you set up your website as you can then build your site around your targeted keywords. You can employ an e-marketing professional to research the best keywords for you, or you can do it yourself.There are some great free tools on the internet. Try out the Overture (Yahoo!) Keyword Suggestion Tool. Here you can type in keywords and the keyword suggestion tool will return an estimation of the monthly search volume for that phrase in Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. It will also show results for similar keywords.You should select about 15 keywords and key phrases. Perform searches using these words to find competitors’ websites and see what keywords they are using in their websites, and how they are employed.Another excellent tool to help you select the best keywords is Wordtracker. It can tell you how often people search for the keywords you chose and can offer some excellent alternative suggestions. You can try it out for free on the Wordtracker website. Google also offers a free keyword suggestion tool.Once you have selected the right keywords for your website, you will need to use them wisely to achieve the best search engine optimization. The search engines do not like the overuse of keywords and you may even get banned if there are two many keywords and key phrases on your pages.Keep keyword density in articles to about 2% and make sure that all content reads well and is informative. Articles written with the sole purpose of packing in as many keywords as possible will quickly drive visitors to your site away.Also, be sure to include your keywords in page titles, META data, and try to work them in to links on your site when possible. Following these tips should help you strike the right balance when choosing your keywords and boost your search engine page ranking.