It is amazing how little time many people spend on choosing a keyword.  When you consider it is the keyword that can make or break how successful and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) campaign is, you would think that many people would spend a lot of time doing it.

Yet for a lot of Internet Marketers it is simply a chore to get out of the way – if they bother doing it at all!  Picking the wrong keyword phrase can simply mean a lot of wasted work and no real income.

So how do you choose the right keyword?  What you need is keyword research.

Keyword Research

Do people search for it?  No point in targeting keywords that no one is looking for.  Pop along to the Google Keyword Tool and check it out.  But don’t just look at the searches, choose the ‘exact’ option form the side – this lets you know how many people are typing in that exact keyword phrase.  Also make sure you get the traffic you want by looking at local traffic.  If you are targeting US visitors, people living in China will rarely be useful.

How much competition.  Whilst the strength of the competition (see below) is a vital factor, the less people competing the better.  So Google the keyword phrase and see how many pages are indexed.

Strength of the competition.  Knowing that people look for that keyword phrase is not enough, you need to know that you can rank for it.  This means analysing the competition to see if you can out rank them.

There are a number of things that you should study when checking the competition strength. Look to see how many backlinks they have (Yahoo Site Explorer is free and does this for you).  Also look to see if they are optimised for the keyword – is the keyword used a lot?  Is it in titles, headers etc?

Keyword research is vital, don’t skip over it or rush it.