The Importance of Keyword Research to SEO Success

Search engine optimization is something many people spend a lot of time trying to learn about.  There is a lot to learn if you want to receive tons of traffic to your website.  Before you can start using SEO though, you will need to spend some time doing keyword research.  This research is one of the most important tasks when it comes to building a new website.

Keyword research focuses on finding keywords that have the potential to send plenty of visitors to your site.  Therefore, you will need to find out how many people are searching for those keywords every week or month.  If you rise to the top of the search engine rankings for those keywords, then you could expect a good percentage of those searchers to visit.

It should go without saying that higher search counts are better when researching keywords.  However, keywords that are highly searched for may be plagued by the problem of excess competition.  That is one of the reasons it is important to check out the competition too when researching keywords.

The less competition each keyword you are going after has, the better it will be for you.  Just because a keyword has a lot of competition does not mean that it is impossible for you to rank for.  Determine the level of competition since some sites will be easier to overtake than others.

It is usually best to compile the biggest list of keywords as possible.  That way, you can whittle down the choices while hopefully finding highly-searched phrases with little competition that other webmasters have not discovered yet.

As you can see, researching keywords is vital to your SEO success.  There are various ways you can perform this research.  You can start out by simply taking a look at some of your competition's websites and seeing which keywords they are targeting.  However, it is much better to use tools, especially if you want to conduct research thoroughly, yet efficiently.

The Wordtracker tool is one of the best online tools you can use.  Just know it is not free.  If you are not willing to pay for your research, then you can use Google's Adwords keyword tool.  Although you will need to sign up for an Adwords account for the most thorough results since it is built for advertisers, it is an amazing resource for website publishers as well.

Do not start using SEO until you have conducted proper keyword research.  You never want to start off on the wrong foot.