One of the biggest mistakes a website can make is to ignore keyword research.  It is doesn't matter how great your website is or how low your prices are, if nobody can find it.  For people to be able to find your website, you need to get your website to show up in search engine queries related to your niche.  If you don't take the time to figure out what keywords people are using to find your products or services, all you can do is blindly guess which keywords to use.  You'll probably be able to guess some good keywords, but there are likely hundreds of other keywords that you haven't even considered.  Some of your choices may not even be worth targeting.

Not Everyone Searches Like You. If you want to get website traffic, quality website traffic, then you HAVE TO do keyword research!

Too many people assume that they know exactly which phrases people will use when searching for their products or services.  To you it may make sense for most people to just type in your exact product name.  Not everyone thinks and behaves the same way as you do though.  Here are some ways that their searches could vary:

-They may throw in an extra descriptive word. 

-They may use a synonym for your product

-They might type a whole sentence or just a 2 word phrase.

-They might use regional spelling or terminology.

These are just some examples of why kewyword research is important and you have to do it to get quality website traffic!.THere are just to many ways or search variations, for a person to search for your niche using the search engines!

 

THis is why knowing the linguistics of your niche is important (and yes you learn that doing keyword research) Some other people might not even know what your product is called.  Some people may search for a very broad phrase, while others search for something very precise.  You just don't know really know what people are searching for unless you do some research.

How Good Keywords Will Help Your Website

Choosing the best keywords can have a substantial impact on your bottom line.  Good keywords can improve your traffic volume, total sales and conversion rates.

By doing keyword research you can get a good idea of which keywords get the most search volume.  This ensures that you are targeting keywords that enough people are searching for, instead of wasting resources on keywords that don't get enough searches.  Advanced keyword research will also help identify which keywords have less competition.  These keywords would be easier to get rankings and traffic from. And this is how you drive quality traffic to your website.

 

If you reallly want to do keyword research right, it is a process and quality keyword research software like Keyword Research Pro is priceless AND WILL give you a competitive advantage AND WILL result in driving better auality traffic to your website. Yes you pay for a tool like keyword research pro but it is worthe every penny. If you increase your traffic volume, your overall sales are bound to improve, especially if you are targeting quality, relevant keywords.
 

You can use free tolls like google adwords etc. and they will give you the very basics and that basic keyword research is better then nothing.

When you do keyword research you will be able to identify which keywords are most relevant to your niche.  Targeting highly relevant keywords improves the quality of traffic on your website.  These people are much more likely to buy your products or services.

What If You Ignore Keyword Research

Ignoring keyword research is a little like opening up a store but not bothering to put a sign out front.  That sign tells your potential customers what your store offers.  If those people don't know what your store specializes in, they may very well walk right by your store without going in.  Not putting a 'sign' on your website is even worse.  Instead of getting a lot of street traffic that might walk into your store, your store is now in a back alley with a sign written in Swahili.

If you don't do proper keyword research, you either won't get much traffic or that traffic will be low quality.  Usually it will be a combination of both.  As a result your sales and profits will suffer.  The people looking for your products may never find your website.  Essentially you would be wasting the potential of your website.  If you want your website to succeed, keyword research is a must!

By: Jeremy Biberdorf

Sam asked:


SEO has attained extreme importance these days. But there is so much written and discussed about SEO, that often a common user gets confused with the concepts and the terminologies used. We have tried to simplify all the concepts with the help of visuals – as part of our Online SEO course.
I expect the following from all you members –
1. Tell us which topics in SEO, you feel difficult to understand. We will try to explain them with the help of visuals.
2. Kindly, view our visual creations of certain topics of SEO and give us feedback.

Here are the links –
1. http://telezent.com/telezent/Optimizing-your-website.aspx
2. http://telezent.com/telezent/google-indexing-flash.aspx
3. http://telezent.com/telezent/search-engine-ranking.aspx
4. http://telezent.com/telezent/keyword-research-process.aspx

I hope that our creations will help the SEO community, globally.

Having your website up and running is the first step, but one thing that I learned from Michael Cheney is that you need to optimize your website for your specific keywords, so that you can start climbing in the search engine ranking.

Keyword research will make SEO so much faster and PPC so much cheaper. And you can do this research for FREE with the tools I’ll show you!

Here are some of the tools that I use for my keywords research:

- Market Samurai (free!)

- Google Keyword (free!)

- www.spyfu.com (free!)

- www.wordtracker.com (free trial)

- www.hexatrack.com (free!)

- www.KeyCompete.com (free trial)

What you are doing with your keyword research is you are narrowing your market into your specific niche. You are using a laser beam instead of a flashlight.

So instead of a broad market like?computers, you could narrow it down:

Computers → Laptop computers → Apple Laptops → iBook

See how you have just taken a broad market search term with a ton of website and competition, down to a specific niche with fewer websites and less competition.

You are targeting your specific customer this way too.

You are essentially carving your own slice of cyberspace on the internet with your keyword, that you will then create websites, articles, videos and other content around your keywords.

The coolest thing about the tools I’ve shown you earlier is that as you are searching for your keyword, you are arming yourself with a TON of competitive intelligence and know how to set up your website the right way the first time:

- Competition- who is using you keyword?

- Volume- how many searches a day?

- Trends- are they steady, increasing, declining, or seasonal?

- Commercial intent- how likely is someone to buy something from you based on searching for your keyword?

The commercial intent is one of the coolest things for you and me?because who do we want? Buyers!

We want them to buy from us because of the content and the value that we are giving away.

You want to do your keyword research not only to figure out where the niche is.

You want to make sure that as you’re building pages you’re using that keyword research data and figuring out through PPC which ones are converting the best to then go and build out your websites.

This will tell you what keywords to write articles about or what keywords to go build Squidoo pages around.



By: Adam Spiel