The key words are the life blood of your website and ensuring you have enough relevant and commercially economic phrases to look at in the future will ensure you do not get to a point here you are unable to grow and your site becomes static.

There are a number of tools available to help with your keyword research, among them is Googles free keyword research tool, it gives good general information about suggested words to target, the levels of visitors and some idea of what you would expect to pay for a Pay Per Click campaign.

The number of keyword research tools is growing and the only limits are your budget, most good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies subscribe to 3 or 4 paid for services that can cost several hundred pounds a month, but as the research is important this is not a cost that should be scrimped on. >

Looking at the keywords and phrases that your competitors are ranked for is a good way of learning the phrases you need to consider and using some of the more advanced features of the paid software you can drill right down into this information to give you the competitive advantage you need.

So if you are selling jewellery or promoting charity Christmas cards then the terms you need to be found for must include jewellery or charity Christmas cards, there are several things a Search engine optimisation company can help you with and one of the most fundamental is keyword research & competition analysis.

If you know what your competition are doing to get to the position they are at in the search engines then you can ensure you do the same and just a little more to get in to a better position.

You need to ensure you are spending your time and effort where it counts and where it will do you the most good, search engine optimisation is extremely powerful when done properly and it can see you shooting up the search engine rankings but if too much time and effort is spent ranking for inappropriate or little searched for terms then you will find it hard to get the visitors you need to make your on-line business a success.

If you knew that 90% of all keywords used get next to no traffic you would start to think more seriously about how you research and target your keywords to ensure you get the best return for your investment of time and money for your website.

It is estimated that 50% of keyword searches in the search engines are made just once, now it would not be worth the time it takes to rank for this keyword phrase if you only get one visitor from it, obviously there are exceptions and we all know that every visitor is a potential customer and spending some time and money to get that customer is worth it over the life of the customer but statistically you need to attract hundreds or thousands of visitors with each of the keywords each month.

For your keyword research to be effective you need to think about what people who are looking for your goods or services would put into the search engines in order to find you. You then need to take these phrases and check how many of the people using the internet have searched for these phrases over the past month.

Remember that the number of people looking for 0800 numbers, that is the UK free phone number could be more or less than the number of people looking for the artist Jack Vettriano that does not mean that one term is better than the other if your business is related to phone numbers in the UK then 0800 numbers is more relevant to your telephone business, where as if you have an art gallery or produce art prints then Jack Vettriano artist is a much better term to promote his art work for.

So you need to consider both relevancy and visitor numbers along side the competition levels when you are completing your keyword research.

Other times it is less obvious, they may be a site that offers information, local government and community sites do this a lot, they are not selling things but they still need to be found in the search engines for the correct terms or they will not receive their funding.

Some sites are similar to online catalogs, they show a range of services or products that are available off line, these might include car companies that wish to promote brand awareness but they know the internet is part of the decision making process not the end of it.

The goal for a company like this might be to gather contact information from visitors that can then be used by the off line sales team.

So different techniques and keywords need to be used for each type of site.

When optimising a site you may have picked it up in one of several states;

A new site we have designed for a customer – this has some distinct advantages, we have had chance to meet and speak to the customer about the site, their ambitions and goals for it, from these meetings we know the sort of keywords the customer needs to rank well for.

A new site that was built by someone else that we need to start optimising, care needs to be taken as it is easy to assume that the words used in the text are the correct ones to use in the optimisation, often they are not as they can contain industry terms and abbreviations that are not going to be used when searching for that site.

Sites that have been around and running for a time that are partly optimised, again the danger with these is that you assume the keywords used in the optimisation are correct and just plough ahead with ranking for these, it can be a time consuming and costly error to make these assumptions.

An hour or two spent on keyword research at the beginning of the process can save thousands of pounds in wasted time and effort down the line and can be the difference between retaining a client and seeing the business grow and loosing the client altogether.

Keyword research is a vital part of site optimisation, with out this aspect of the process being completed properly then there is little chance of getting the desired results.

The correct keyword analysis and selection allows us to rank well and drive traffic from the keywords our customers use.

As an example if we were going to sell a book on “how to buy shares on line” your first thoughts might be to optimise for words like:

Shares
Share dealing
Buy shares
Share trading

These are all good useful words and phrases to optimise for but they are too broad for what we are selling, they might deliver traffic to the site but the sales rate would be very low and the competition for top spot very tough.

So instead we must think what would a perspective purchaser of our “online share trading” book use to find such a product, these might include;

Online share trading
How to trade shares online
Buying shares online
Online share dealing information
Online share trading book

The first thing you will notice is that the phrases used to find this product are longer than the previous example, this is because people who are looking to make a purchase rather than just gathering information use more definite search terms.

The term keyword can also mean key phrase – often phrases are more important to rank for than individual words.

We can use various tools to help in the keyword selection process, these will be gone into in more detail later, the thing to remember is always put your self in the customers position, what search term would they use to find your site, these then become your keywords.

We can use various tools to help in the keyword selection process, these will be gone into in more detail later, the thing to remember is always put your self in the customers position, what search term would they use to find your site, these then become your keywords.

This is part 1 of an ongoing keyword research guide, please return for the next part soon