Keyword Research

Keyword research is very important. It can make or break a campaign. All of your web pages should have targeted keywords, but which ones? How do you research and choose the right keyword for your project?

It is very hard to have a successful search engine optimization campaign without proper keyword research. Your main objective, when selecting a keyword is to get your website to show in the search results for key phrases that will benefit your project or business.

How Do I Find The Right Keywords?

There are specific keyword research tools online that help SEO  find the right keywords for their campaigns. There are free and paid tools available.
Below is a short list of the ones I recommend (free and paid).
Free Keyword Research Tools

• Google Keyword Tool
• Wordtracker

Paid Keyword Research Tools

• Market Samurai
• Goodkeywords

Market Samurai is a reasonably priced product and most importantly, it is a very powerful tool for researching key words.

A free alternative would be Google keyword tool. It features a high quality, clean and frequently updated keyword database. 

Wordtracker is also a good alternative but it is limited to 100 results. If you want to see all the keywords, you will have to pay.

How Do I Choose The Right Keyword?

Because it’s free, I will use Google keyword tool for this article.
Basic keyword research is fairly simple.
First, you will have to enter a keyword or phrase that best describes your project or web site. For this example, I will use the phrase “Real Estate”.

As you can see, globally, over 30 million searches are made for the phrase “Real Estate” every month. Ranking on the first page of Google for this phrase would be very profitable but to do so will take an extensive amount of money and time.

Be realistic with keyword selection

If you sort the results by global monthly searches, you’ll see that the phrase “real estate in new jersey” has only 246,000 monthly searches. It has significantly less searches than the phrase “real estate” but, selecting a longer tailed keyword like this will be more targeted to your business (if you have a real estate business in New Jersey).

This keyword will take less time and cost less to optimize for because there is less search volume and less competition. You can use even longer tailed keywords like “buy real estate in new jersey” or “new jersey real estate for sale”.
Remember, just because the keyword has less search volume doesn’t mean it will be less profitable.