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Keyword research is the most important aspect of SEO. Is there any traffic for the keyword you’re thinking of using? What is the competition like? If you don’t have the answers to these questions before you build and optimize your site you will likely be disappointed with the results.You really can learn SEO.

If you are not familiar with keywords they are the words or phrases people type into the search engines to find what they are looking for. When I use “keyword” in this article it will refer to both individual keywords and keyword phrases.

If you are going to do keyword research you are going to need a good keyword tool. I use Market Samurai myself but have also heard go things about Keyword Elite. Both of these tools are over $100 and come with a free trail period. If that seems to steep for your wallet you can use the Google keyword tool for your traffic research and do the competition research manually. Some people also like Micro Niche Finder but I don’t feel it gives you all the competition information you need to make an informed decision.

As you do your SEO keyword research there are two factors to take into consideration: a) Is there enough traffic for the keyword to be worth while and, b) the level of competition. Lets look at traffic first.

When talking about how much traffic you need for a keyword to be worth your time to go after I usually look for keywords with at least 100 searches a day or 3000 a month. This is IMPORTANT: These figures are for “exact match”! Always do keyword research in “exact match”, never in “phrase match” or God forbid “broad match”. There can be huge differences in the results you get and only “exact match”, as it’s name implies, tells you the exact number of searches a keyword phrase receives.

Next let’s discuss levels of competition. Without Market Samurai or another good keyword tool this will take a lot of time and also work. You need to look at many factors for the sites that are in the top 10 of Google to determine just how hard or not it’ll be to get your site on the first page for the key phrase you’re targeting.

Some say all you need to do is search for you keyword in quotes and if the number of sites returned is under a certain amount you are good to go. This may be true it may not be. If there are only 100 sites returned and 25 of them are high Page Rank sites with thousands of good anchor-text one way back links and all have good on-page optimization do you think it will be easy to get on the first page? It’s work but do your competion analysis the right way.

Here are the elements you need to consider: How many links do the top 10 sites have and what is the anchor text of those links (how many are .gov or .edu, Google loves these), this is greatest determining factor of where sites show up in the SERPs. Next look at Page Rank and domain age- The higher the page rank and older the domain the more Google will trust and value the site. Lastly look at on-page SEO factors like Title and Description Tags. Follow this for the best SEO course.

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