If you are serious about building web sites, then you have to perform meaningful keyword research. This is not a guessing game. If, for example, your site is about training puppies, then you might guess that “puppy training” is an obvious keyword to target. It may be, but suppose you discover, through diligent keyword research that the keyword, “strategic puppy training” is far less competitive, but it still has the same number of monthly searches. Wouldn’t it make more sense to target the second keyword, rather than the first? This is something that you can only discover through keyword research.

Lisa Barone in her article at http://www.searchengineguide.com/barone/009492.html has this to say:

“If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines and your customers may never find you, resulting in lost dollars and meaningless rankings. By targeting the wrong keywords, you not only put valuable advertising dollars at risk, you are also throwing away all the time and energy you put into getting your site to rank for those terms to begin with. If you want to stay competitive, you can’t afford to do that.”

The ideal keywords are those that have plenty of people searching for them, but only a few people competing against you. Unfortunately, these kind of keywords are not easy to find. It becomes a kind of compromise most of the time; you shouldn’t target the most highly competitive keywords, but you still want to target the ones that have a reasonable amount of traffic.

If you are selling a product on your web site, then you should try to find the buying keywords. For example, if you have a web site about acne and you target the keyword, “acne remedy,” you may think that this is a good keyword. But what is the searcher seeking? Is it a remedy that he or she wants to buy? Maybe… Or do they want to compare several remedies? There’s really no way of being certain.

But if the keyword is, “where to buy acne remedies,” then we can be more certain that the searcher is ready to hand over their money. They want to know where they can buy a product, and if you present a suitable one to them, the chances are good that they will buy. That’s the power of performing the right keyword research.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Keyword Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.