Keyword Research

There's no getting away from it. Keyword research is a vitally important aspect of any search engine optimisation strategy. If your website is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines and your potential clients may never find you, resulting in lost revenue and meaningless rankings. By targeting the wrong keywords, you not only put valuable advertising monies at risk, you are also throwing away all the time and effort put into getting your website to rank for those keyword or keyword phrases to begin with. If you want to stay competitive, you cannot afford to do that.

One of the most common misconceptions about conducting keyword research ready for search engine optimisation is the belief that you already know which terms to use in your website. You don't - not without first undertaking some research. You may know what your website is about and how you, the website owner, would find your website in the search engines, but it's difficult to predict how a potential client would go about looking for it.

The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to come up with the perfect combination of keywords to drive potential clients to your website, whilst still allowing the search engines to provide you with high enough relevant rankingscould easily give anyone a headache.

Understanding your competition websites tells you how much effort you will need to invest in order to rank well for any particular keyword term. There are two important things when making this decision: how many other websites are competing for the same keyword and how strong are those websites' rankings (i.e. how many other websites link to them, how many web pages do they have indexed in the major search engines)? Basically, are your chosen keywords or keyword phrase even worth your time?

As a clients website changes over time, so will the keywords required to attract potential clients. Therefore it's important to keep monitoring your websites keywords and make tweaks as necessary. Doing so will allow you to stay ahead of your competition.