Description
Introduction
No matter what kind of business activities you undertake on the
internet, there is one fundamental fact that cannot be ignored.
Whether you’re promoting internet marketing products, or selling blue
widgets from a sales enabled website, you cannot hope to be
successful unless people visit your website.
However, having just anybody visit your site is not enough. In order
for your business to be successful, you must attract site viewers who
are interested in the product or service that you are promoting or
selling. In other words, your visitors must be targeted prospects.
For example, if you are the biggest supplier of blue widgets in your
locality, it is not going to help your business if everybody who visits
your site is only interested in buying red or green widgets.
Similarly, if your site is promoting an internet marketing product that
is related to selling on eBay, you’re not going to make many sales if
the people who visit your site are interested in advanced search engine
optimization techniques.
Of course, you do not necessarily want to stop people visiting your
site. Even visitors who initially have no interest whatsoever in your
product or service may be convinced to do business with you if you
have an effective sales page related to a product that they gradually
begin to see a use for. However, most of your sales and success will
be based upon targeted visitors landing on your site.
Keyword research is fundamentally important to the process of driving
targeted visitors to your website. They say that the success of your
business ventures online is predicated on how successful you are in
your keyword research efforts.
There are many different ways of undertaking effective keyword
research. ‘The Keyword Research Bible’ contains many of them. Many
of the methods that you are about to read of are free, and for most
people these free tools are more than adequate.
There are, however, some more advanced keyword research resources
listed later in this book that will cost you money. However, given the
importance of good keyword research to the overall success of your
business, any money that you spend on the best tools is always going
to represent money well spent.
3
Why is keyword research important?
Keyword research is all about forcing the search engines to find your
website. The vast majority of people who search on the internet do so
using search engines like Google or Yahoo!, and you therefore need to
make these search engines find your site as often as possible.
Although things are rapidly changing, the search engines are still
overwhelmingly text based. In other words, they read the words on
the page, and to a large extent they ignore graphics and video.
However, Google in particular is very keen on ranking video materials
as well. This is indicative of another important factor about the search
engines, which is that they are constantly adapting their practices to
match ever-changing markets.
At this moment, however, search engines are overwhelmingly text
based search tools, so Flash or Shockwave videos on your site count
for nothing with the engines. This despite the fact that your human
visitors may love them!
All the major search engines use ‘algorithms’ to decide how highly they
will rate any website that they analyze. Such algorithms are essentially
programs (spiders) that can ‘read’ the words on your page, and then
index that particular page based upon what these words tell them the
page is about, and how they value it.
A properly constructed webpage will be focused on a particular
keyword or phrase. Making sure that this happens is the concern of
those who are involved in the art of ‘search engine optimization’
(SEO).
The first step in the SEO process is to find the keywords or phrases
that are going to be most effective for driving targeted traffic to the
webpage in question.
Secondly, the webpage will be constructed around that particular
keyword or phrase in order to make sure that the search engine
‘spiders’ realize that this is the phrase you want to be ranked for.
Keyword research must therefore be the most fundamental and vital
ingredient of creating a webpage that the search engines will visit,
analyze and hopefully love.
When a search engine spider visits your page, it is looking for the most
important terms you are using, so that whenever any web searcher
types the same term into the search box, the engine shows them your
site page. In this way, the search engine helps to send targeted
visitors to your site.
