What You Should Know About Keyword Research

Keyword research can be the most dreaded part of any internet marketer's activity for the reason that it takes up a lot of time but it is one of the most important aspect of any internet marketer's success. Without a list of keywords, an internet marketer's website, articles and Adwords ads will be lost in the billions of competition that exist.

Keywords are important for internet success. Without proper keyword optimization, your website will never be found by the search engine and if it is found, it will probably be on the 150th page which is no good. But how to do proper keyword research? In this keyword research guide, I will show you how the experts do it.

First, you must know the keywords you're targeting. If for example, your niche is golf then obviously your targeted keyword would be golf. You can use the free or the paid keyword research tool. I would suggest that when you're starting out to use the free tool that is available from Google - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This keyword tool is invaluable. It gives you keyword suggestions as well as the amount of bids for each keyword so you can choose wisely the keywords to use for your Adwords campaign.

When you start your keyword research, you might first want to go for the broad term first. From the broad term golf, you'll get :

1. golf clubs,
2. golf course,
3. golf equipment,
4. golf balls and
5. golf lessons.

Choose the keywords that you want to use for your website or articles and then go to Google keyword tool and find the number of searches made for each terms.

The following is the search results for the above terms.

1. Golf alone returns 101 million searches,
2. golf clubs - 6.12 million searches,
3. golf course - 14,800 searches,
4. golf equipment - 1.5 million searches,
5. golf balls - 1 million searches and
6. golf lessons - 201,000 searches.

Let's see the competition for these keywords. Go to Google search page and enter all these keywords in quotes. Here are the competition for the above keywords :

1. golf - 315 million,
2. golf clubs - 6.3 million,
3. golf course - 32.7 million,
4. golf equipment - 4.2 million,
5. golf balls - 3.64 million and
6. golf lessons - 1.01 million.

Now, to determine which one is a good keyword to optimize, you have to divide the number of competition by the number of searches. So,

1. golf - 3.11,
2. golf clubs - 1.029,
3. golf course - 2209.48,
4. golf equipment - 2.8,
5. golf balls - 3.64 and
6. golf lessons - 5.0.

Now, here is the criteria for a good keyword :

1. Competition divided by Searches is less than 50 and
2. Competition is less than 2 million

All our golf niche keywords except golf course satisfies the number 1 condition but only golf lessons satisfies both the criteria. Don't give up on the other keywords. What you can do is to find longer keywords also known as long-tail keywords. For example instead of using the keyword golf equipment, you may use the keyword golf equipment review which has a competition of 89900 and a search of 2900 which gives it a ratio of competition to searches of 31 which is a good keyword to use.

Ideally, the best keywords are the ones with a lot of searches and the least competition. But the world isn't an ideal place. Normally, you'll get a lot of searches and just as many competition or very little competition and equally little searches. But it is still possible to get good highly searched keywords. You just need to do your homework. Once you've found these keywords, use it, optimize it and you will get traffic.

Yes, you will be found by the search engine if your site is full of unique content. But you first need to be indexed by the search engine. Read my article Google Loves Bukisa about getting indexed by Google. If content is king, then the keywords are the pawns that drive the search engine to your content. Therefore, doing proper keyword research is of utmost importance and is not to be ignored.