I want to know what everyone else thinks about Keyword Research. Is it more or less important than other parts of your Marketing process? Hopefully we can gather some useful information that everyone will be able to make use of. We will work with a scale of one to five. 1 meaning Keyword Research is not needed. 5 meaning Keyword Research is absolutely the most important part of Internet Marketing. If you have the time, please post your reasoning behind your response. If you have no useful information on the topic, please do not vote as you will just unbalance things and give us all false information. Remember, this is for the good of the Internet Marketing Community.
I voted a 4 - It depends on your strategy. If you're aiming to get a large portion of your traffic from organic results then Hell Yeah - It's REAL important for generating traffic (However, what you do with your visitor once they hit your page is equally important). You need to target not just "easy" keywords with low competition and decent traffic - But they need to be "Buying keywords". Example (these are made-up results) Assume you are a plumber and want to generate traffic (via Google SE) to your website, You see there a 1000 searches per day on "how to unblock bath" and only 200 competing pages. Sounds great right? Wrong - These visitors are looking for tips (e.g - bicarb' soda with white vinegar) - Free information - They're not looking for a plumber so even though you can get in the top ten results and generate traffic really easily, why bother? On the other hand - You see 50 searches per day for the term "best plumbers in Florida" and there are 20,000 competing pages then tha could be worth digging into. These visitors have already decided they want a plumber, they just don't know which one yet. How many of those do you think will convert to a sale? Also - Don't just look at the number of competitors but the strength of them. Check out their backlinks - Use Seoquake or Yahoo-site-explorer and grab some links from the same places, check out the Pagerank of the top ten results. Is it PR0-3 or are they PR 5+? Take all this into account and you're onto a winner everytime. Cheers, John.
It`s the most important part in my opinion. If I want to start a site, I first try to find some good keywords....and if I don`t find anything good, I think about other niche/idea...without good keywords you won`t achieve anything!
I rated: 4 Why? because keyword research is not the most important factor when utilizing SEO strategies, instead it must work in conjunction with on page and off page factors. Weather all hats of seo techniques is a must when mastering seo
Ok, so everyone agrees that Keyword Research is a very important part of their marketing. Is there any advice or tools that you use to make Keyword Research quicker and easier?
Tools There's a ton of c**p and a few good ones. Personally I use... Market Samurai webcompanalyst (by jonathan ledger) nichebot's pretty good too. Advice really depends on your goals - are you targetting small easy-to-rank niche keywords or more competetive but potentially more rewarding phrases. Top tip with any keyword research - Everyone says look at how many competitors there are but don't stop here. Check out how good your competition is. How many backlinks? Pagerank? List in Dmoz? Domain age? number of pages in site? How many of their backlinks are focussed on the target keyword? Is the keyword in domain name/title tags and general on-page SEO? If you know your competition then you know how to beat them. Cheers, John.
I would say Keyword research is just like setting a goal to reach your Online-targets! The best work you grab doing a keyword research the best you will reach to your targets!
Keywords are as important as all SEO. Where you use your keywords can help. Try to use them in the title of your blog and try to buy your url(s) containing your keywords. Clare1956
The most important part before start the optimization Without good research on the keyword, we are not able to get good result although SEO is doing well
5 without a doubt! It goes without saying that there are other factors that contribute to good search engine results but keywords are your life line, especially long tail keywords. Google adwords keyword tool is a great start, but paying for a service that really gets down to what people are looking for is your best bet. Unless you have millions of dollars to spend, you will never big the biggest dog on the block. Do your research and find a handful of long tail keywords you can dominate. After that you'll see an avalanche of traffic.
Although I listed a couple of tools above these simply make things easier. The important thing here is HOW you conduct your reserach and WHICH factors you include when you choose your final qualifying keywords. Here's a few examples: Number of searches NOT just number of competitors but Strength of Competition (as above) Number of backlinks Number of pages in site Age of Domain Are they listed in Dmoz Do they have good On-Page SEO (title tage etc) Is main target keyword in Domain Do they make good use of LSI phrases in their content (Use Google Wonder-wheel for great LSI Phrases) There are courses around that will charge you $97+ for the privalage of learning the above summary so don't take this lightly just cos it's listed in a forum thread. I'm not blowing my own trumpet just trying to help out. A lot of people know this stuff already but don't actually put it into practice. Cheers, John.
For my mind, it is one of the most important things for any SEO research, development, optimization, etc., because everything "starts" from keywords...
It will always be important for Keyword research. Without it doing this step, we won't be able to move forward.
I prefer to the 5 option that it is the most important part of the internet marketing .it gives the life to increase the ranking.with out using appropriate keywords we cannot achieve anything.the whole optimization depends on the key words.it is helpful in increasing the traffic.
I have gone with the 5, coz keyword is the search term that is used by the visitors, if you don't have any keyword upon your site than how it would be possible to search you out for a visitors to search you from out of millions and millions website. In internet marketing you have to go at the ground level and have to catch the thinking of a general visitors. This is the main key to make you visible in front of the user. This is the fact when you go to the search engine, you have to put some key phrases to search what you want and the search engine generates a query as per your search term and displays the results bases on your search term.
It is very important to do a keyword search before anything else. What you did in searching for keyword will affect the position that you will have in SE.