Is Keyword Research Important?

Many webmasters want high search engine rankings for keywords. Choosing the right keywords is very crucial to your success on the internet. If you want success online, keyword research is definitely necessary. If you ignore keyword research for a website, you are setting yourself up to fail.

There are many inexperienced website owners that claim that you should use keywords that are long tail. If you want to rank well and make money, then long tail keywords may actually waste your time. Majority of long tail keywords won’t get searched at all. If you optimize for some long tail keywords, it doesn’t matter if you are first or last, you won’t see any traffic.

You really need to look for keywords that get searched but aren’t being optimized very well. You should not base your keyword choice on whether it is long tail or not. The length of a keyword does not indicate how competitive it is. Some five word keywords are more competitive than one word keywords, and they would be considered long tail.

I will tell you how I do my keyword research. At first, I choose a bunch of keywords that are relevant to my website. Secondly, I use a keyword research tool called Keyword Elite and I find how much each keyword gets search per month. I stay away from the Google Keyword Tool because I believe it gives a higher search volume than it really is.

After that, I make a search for the keywords that have good search volume. I then use Yahoo Site explorer to analyze the number one ranked websites and their backlinks. After analyzing, I check to see how many backlinks they have and what the anchor text is.

If most of the links do not contain the keyword in them, then I know that the website owner is a rookie. With relevant backlinks and patience, I will easily be able to get the number one spot for that certain keyword.

New website owners get scared of competition and don’t realize that it’s actually not that hard to rank well. You have to understand that most website owners don’t even know anything about search engine optimization. If you do find website owners that aren’t doing good search engine optimization, you should be able to take their position and make money.