Search engine keyword research: what is it?

Search engine keyword research is the process by which you determine what keywords you would like your site to rank for. It is entirely possible to build a site without doing this and you will rank for something on the search engines. However since you are likely looking for visitors who are searching for something specific a far better approach would be to build your site so that it is targeted at those people. To do this you are going to need to research the keywords before you start building your site. Remember that most sites will target multiple keywords.

The first thing that you have to do when you are doing keyword research is to determine which keywords are relevant to the topic of your site. There will likely be thousands of them so you will have to spend quite a bit of time on this part. You can do this by brainstorming what you might type into a search engine in order to find your site. There are also several tools that can help you with this, you enter the topic of your site and it will give you a long list of options.

The next thing that you are going to want to do is to determine just how many people search for that term each month. You are obviously not going to want to target keywords that nobody searches for. Ideally you want to go after the most widely used keywords but you have to be careful here, these are also the ones that have the most competition from other sites. There are lots of tools that you can use to determine how many searches each keyword gets in a month. Determine a minimum number of searches that will make a keyword worth targeting and make a list of all of these keywords.

The next step in your keyword research is determine how much competition there is. You are probably not going to want to target highly competitive phrases unless you have the resources to do so effectively. There are a couple of methods that can be used to check the competition. The first is to simple do a search and see how many results come up, the more sites the stiffer the competition. While this does work it is not really the best approach.

The problem with using the number of sites as a guide to the competition is that it tells you nothing about the quality of the competition. Since your goal is the first page of the search results your competition is really only the pages that are already there. You may find that in some cases a keyword doesn't have a lot of sites in the results but the sites on the first page are all high quality sites that are nearly impossible to beat. On the other hand you will find keywords with lots of results but few quality sites. Therefore the best approach is to determine how tough the pages on the first page will be to beat.