Internet Marketing (Part 4 )

Keyword Research

Keyword research is probably the single most important task that you will undertake with regards on your Internet website marketing. Long before dealing with do the work. creating your website you will need to identify your target market. If you are skilled in business you may well already understand this concept as the identification of the people you will try to sell your product or service. When it comes to marketing a website there is another vital layer that is just as important, to research your target keywords.

Keywords play an important role within Internet marketing as they help identify a particular topic or niche for a given web page or resource; for example if you were to pay to advertise your website on other sites on the web, you may well only want your advertisement to appear on pages related to the product or service that you offer. Most advertising agencies allow you to target your ads to specific keywords. If we wanted to advertise our car parts website we might opt for targeting sites that contain the word "other accessories" etc.

And When you are making your own website  keywords play an even bigger role. As most web traffic originates from search engines it would make sense to make our website perform as well as possible within these search engine result pages for that  people who are  looking for our type of product or service, and the key to this is proper keyword research.

The first step is to identify the top words and phrases that not only relate to your services, products, business or brand, but those phrases that users are likely to actually type into a search engine when looking for the type of products or services that you offer.

Start by identifying two or three top keyword phrases that are used to search for your type of website. A keyword may be a single word, e.g. "cars", or contain several words, often referred to as long tail keywords . Targeting a long tail keywords is usually more effective as they have a more refined scope combined with less competition.

If your type of business is location based, as in our previous pizza delivery example, you would most certainly want to include your location (city, town, county etc.) amongst your targeted keywords.

All of your selected keywords must be related to your business or niche. The use of unrelated keywords within your web pages can cost you penalties in the search engines and also make your site look spammy and unprofessional.

There are numerous resources available on the web that can help with your keyword research. One very useful resource is the Adwords Keyword Planner provided by Google.

Adwords is Google's own PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising service and provides this tool to allow customers to research keywords to bid on. We can use this tool to get an idea of how many searches are conducted using our initial list of keywords, and refine our list to only include the most popular search terms and phrases. You can easily make a free account by just clicking here