Top 10 Benefits of Effective Keyword Research
Copyright Herman Drost

If you want to build a web site that attracts search engine
traffic you need to do extensive keyword research first.
Many site owners put up a site and wait for a flood of
traffic. After waiting several weeks or months of getting
no traffic they give up.

Why?

They didn't create an effective keyword research plan.

Let's look at all the areas that keyword research should
cover by outlining its benefits.

Top 10 benefits of effective keyword research

1. Understand what words are being searched on

People searching for information on the Net enter specific
keywords or keyword phrases in the search engines. Your
keyword research will show you what words they are using so
you can include these in the content of your site.

2. Analyze your competition

Even if you may have a brilliant idea for a product or
service it may "not fly" if there is too much competition.
For example let's say you want to build a site on "web
hosting" A search on Google (Sept 29th, 2006) produces
216,000,000 web sites. Your chance of obtaining high
rankings for this term would therefore be very slim.

3. Understand keyword rankings

The top 10 sites will have achieved their status using a
number of methods. Some of these may include obtaining many
high quality back links, optimizing their sites to attract
the search engines, or paying to have their site listed in
the sponsored results (ie the top 3 sites in Google under
sponsored listings).

Let's look at each of these separately:

4. Understand link popularity

This refers to the number of incoming links (back links) to
your site. The quantity and quality of the links has a
significant effect on your search engine rankings. If you
obtain a link form a site that gets thousands of visitors,
your site will get a "leg up" in the search engines. If you
get links from many high traffic sites your rankings will
increase dramatically.

5. Understand what anchor text to use

Anchor text are the words you would include in the link
back to your site. If you include the keywords you
researched in the link this will give the link more weight
by the search engines than if you just used a standard link
without using keywords, or if you used standard text that
is not a live link.

6. Understand how a site was optimized

Effective keyword research will provide you with in-depth
knowledge of how your competitor's site was optimized for
the search engines and how you also can create a site that
will attract search engine traffic.

For example, a site that contains javascript navigation
using images may not capture the visitors that have
javascript turned off. Also, if the site uses javascript
pop-ups and the visitor has software on their computer that
removes pop-ups, they will lose out on web traffic.

7. Uncover profitable niches

If you haven't found a niche yet for your new web site,
effective keyword research will show you what particular
product or service will be profitable. You may even
discover potential markets you can tap into for future
projects.

8. Find high paying keywords for AdSense Sites

If you intend to build a site for AdSense revenue, you may
want to find some high paying keywords to incorporate in
your content. This can substantially increase your adsense
revenue. You can also find build content sites around
keywords you have researched that are not so competitive.

9. Find low paying keywords for AdWords Ads.

You can avoid spending a lot of your hard earned money by
finding keywords that many people are searching on but
don't cost much then create your adwords campaign based on
these keywords.

10. Gain insights into search engine saturation

This refers to the total of pages a search engine has in
its index for your website domain. It indicates what pages
or sections of your site or your competitors' sites are
showing up in the search engines. It will also show how
much traffic you or your competitors are getting from the
search engines.

Conclusion

Doing effective keyword research first, will save you lots
of time, money and frustration because you will clearly
know what the profitable keywords are, how to incorporate
them into your site to obtain high rankings. Ultimately
this will attract more visitors and thus generate more
sales.

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Herman Drost is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
and owner of iSiteBuild.com
Web Site Design, Web Hosting, Web Site Promotion

Author of “Marketing Tips” newsletter.
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