If you want your website to rank in the search engines, you'll need to optimize it for particular keyword phrases. Keyword research is the process of finding out which keywords will be the easiest and most beneficial to optimize for.

Generally, you'll be looking at two things:

1. Search volume: How many people search for the keyword in a given month.
2. Competition: How many competing websites are also optimized for this keyword phrase.

Why is keyword research important? Well, you can't just pick some keywords and keyword phrases off the top of your head and expect to easily rank for them. If your website is just getting off the ground, you will find it exceptionally difficult to rank for a keyword like “lose weight” or “quit smoking” or even “cat litter”.

However, if you conduct proper keyword research, you may be able to find similar keyword phrases that have a decent search volume and little competition. Those are the keywords that you want to target.

I could probably go on and on for one hundred pages about keyword research, but I know you have a busy schedule, so I'm just going to get straight to the point.

To easily conduct keyword research (for free), all you need are two resources at your disposal: The Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and the Google search engine itself.

Open up the Keyword Tool and input your desired keywords. How do you know which keywords to list? Well, let's say you have a website about jewelry. The keyword phrases you choose could be:

buy homemade jewelry
buy homemade necklaces
buy homemade earrings
online jewelry store

Basically, anything related to the content of your website. Generally, the more targeted your keywords are, the better. So if you specialize in turquoise jewelry only, don't bother optimizing for “jewelry” (an exceptionally hard keyword to rank for) – just “turquoise jewelry”.

Additionally, don't try to rank for “pearl jewelry” if that's not what your website covers. You want to attract visitors who are specifically looking for “turquoise jewelry” – they will come to your website and see that you are offering them exactly what they are looking for. The overall quality of your traffic will be better and your conversions will be higher.

Browse through the keyword list and copy down all the keyword phrases that interest you. Generally it's safe to assume that the higher the search volume, the higher the competition, and vice versa. However, this isn't always the case. It's still possible to stumble upon some real gems – keywords with high search volume and little competition.

Let's take a look at this keyword: discount jewelry store. As you can see, it gets 1600 searches per month.Now go to Google and type it in with quotes, like this: “discount jewelry store”

The quotes tell Google to only show websites that are optimized for the entire keyword phrase, in order. Without quotes, Google searches for all websites that contain the words discount, jewelry, and store, but not necessarily together, and not necessarily in order. So keeping the phrase in quotes is
important because it'll give you a more accurate idea of the competition.

As you can see, Google tells us that there are 19,600 competing websites for this keyword phrase. Generally anything under 50,000 is considered pretty good. The lower the better.

Another search you can do is allintitle: “discount jewelry store” and allinanchor: “discount jewelry store”.

The first tells you how many websites are optimized with the keyword phrase in the title and the second tells you how many contain the keyword as anchor text in a link. This, in a sense, is your “true” competition, because these people purposely optimizing for your keyword.

Finally, it's important to look at the specific pages that turn up in the top 10 – 20 results. Check their Page Rank. You can download a free plugin for Firefox called “Seo For Firefox”. There will be a tiny icon at the bottom of your browser that will tell you the PR of any website you're browsing.

For more detailed information on quick SEO for busy people you may want to study this guide :

SEO For Busy Marketers

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