Keyword Research Before Creating Content

Keyword research should be at the top of your list when you are planning a search engine optimization strategy. This will save you a lot of pain and headaches in the end, because as you may already know high search engine rankings don’t happen overnight and without proper keyword research you may find out that you have just wasted an incredible amount of time targeting the wrong keywords. So to prevent wasting your time proper keyword research should be preformed to find the top searched phrases in your category.

To get your keyword research underway you’ll want to start with a keyword tool, a simple search will net you a great variety of options, but I prefer to use Google Adwords this tool is basically used for picking out keywords for your PPC (pay-pay-click) campaign but can be used for the start of keyword research. To start just type in a key-word phrase you would like to target and it presents you with those results and other combinations of phrases that people may be using to find the same thing you are providing, in addition it shows a rough estimation of competition and how many searches are performed each month for the particular combination. After combing through these results and finding the particular keywords you would like to target you may next want to get a handle on how difficult it will be to actually achieve top rankings for these keyword results, there is a couple of ways to do this first you could just go by the estimation or you could take into account how many average searches it gets per month the higher the amount of searches the more difficult it will be to achieve ranking. You may also choose to employ a third party tool, again there is many out there but seomoz.org has a good one at SEOmoz keyword difficulty, however to use this tool you’ll have to become a pro-member, which IMO is well worth it with all the other tools and information that will be at your disposal. Anyway, after finding the keyword difficultly you may once again want to change some of the phrases you were thinking about targeting especially if you are just starting out, you may want to target some easier to obtain phrases first. This will help you to gain a following and also you will better know and find ways to obtain rankings for these targeted phrases.

There is a lot of work involved when finding keywords to target but finding the right ones that will bring you traffic is what your overall goal is. Although this is just the start to your campaign and there is still a lot of work to be accomplished, as now you’ll have to create content that targets these keywords which can be tricky as you will not want to include them too many times so that your content appears to be spam and not to few of times so that they do not appear to be unimportant to your message.

Hopefully this post will help to point you down the right path to getting your search engine optimization strategy underway, but this is definitely not an all inclusive post as there is much more work that needs to be done. Just keep in mind that it is a lot of work and try not to get frustrated because it will take some time to see the results of all your hard work.