Like a foundation for a building, there is one feature of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that is more significant than any other. Without this foundation, you may be homicide all your time and resources. Proper keyword research should be the foundation of your optimization.

Why is Keyword Research Critical?

Keyword research decides which keywords you should be targeting with the SEO. Most people imagine that they know which keywords they should aim. Nature can be a great resource, but it can also be deceptive and is almost always not sufficient. For instance, "search engine optimization" gets an estimated 16,000 searches a day while "search engine marketing" gets an estimated 8,800 searches a day. If your gut tells you to target "search engine marketing", you may get huge rankings, but it would only get you half of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for "search engine optimization". There are also keywords that you may not be able to rank well for without a sufficient time and considerable amount of link building in spite of how well you optimize your site. In addition, there are keywords that other people will use to search for what your site offers that you would in no way even think of. So, in addition to allowing you know which keywords are more well-liked, the research can also provide new keywords to target.

Portraying on the analogy in our search marketing parable (found on the Church Marketing Online blog), optimizing your website without first doing keyword research is like trying to choose apples from a tree without first inspecting to see if there are any apples on it or if the apples are within your reach. You could finish up putting in a lot of effort but going home with little fruit from your labor. So it's an important part of search engine optimization.

What Do I Research?

There are two major aspects to keyword research. The first is popularity, how often are keywords really searched for. Unluckily, Google, Yahoo, and MSN don't share the real number of searches for particular keywords; however, there are a small number of tools online which are usually thought to be pretty correct and Google does offer a free tool that gives the "approximate" number of searches for some keywords. The keyword popularity tools (other than Google's) use the search data from a number of other less important search engines along with a few algorithms to forecast how many searches are being made for particular keywords. It's not ideal, but it gives you an idea of which keywords are most well-liked. Since Google's figures come from Google, they are almost certainly the most correct, but even their figures are only estimates and I've found that many keywords return a "Not enough data" outcome. You may desire to use both Google and another keyword popularity tool.

The second feature to keyword research is competition research. Competition research begins with analyzing your web pages to decide how competitive your site is both in general and for specific keywords. This is from time to time referred to as page strength. I should note that there are actually two aspects to page strength, the general strength of a site and the specific strength of a page within the site. For the sake of ease, in this article I will use "web page" for both. The next step is to check the keywords themselves to see how competitive they are. This is sometimes known as keyword difficulty. Determining keyword difficulty is done partly by examining how competitive the pages are that rank well for this keyword, although other methods can be useful as well. This can be complicated for two reasons.

1. No one other than that search engine designers knows how each search engine determines how competitive a site or page is and the search engine folks aren't talking.

2. Each search engine has a diverse way of determining how competitive a site or page is. Therefore, even if you could figure out one, it wouldn't essentially be so with the other search engines.

In spite of these problems the search engines do provide us some general information about what makes web pages competitive (what determines page strength). I'll look more into how you decide keyword competition in my next article.

Without good keyword research, your search engine optimization efforts will be like firing a gun into the dark. You may hit something, you may not. You may select keywords that are not searched for or keywords that are way too competitive for your site at that time. It's most excellent to know what you require to be targeting.