Whenever you’re discussing Search engine optimization you should begin with keyword research due to the fact that any time you don’t get this right everything else is going to be off as well. I can’t stress this strongly enough- if you foul up your keyword research you’ll be unsuccessful, do it properly and everything else is a piece of cake. You really can learn SEO.

Just in case you don’t know, keywords are how everyone finds what they are searching for online. They may be one word keywords or an entire keyword phrase but for the purposes of this article I’ll use “keyword” to describe both.

To carry out your keyword research you will definitely want to use keyword software which can be 100 % free to over $100. If you are short on money use the Google keyword tool, just search for Google keyword tool in Google. If you’re able to find the money for it I go with, and would advocate using, Market Samurai. It is $149 (at the moment) and there’s a trial offer that will allow you to use for free (I’m not sure for how long). Yet another good choice (or so I have heard) is Keyword Elite. I additionally use Micro Niche Finder however I only use it for a fast recon. You require far more in-depth competion research than it can supply. I’d personally not recommend it as being your only software.

Keyword research for SEO purposes involves 2 main components: 1. Is there ample website traffic for the keyword to end up being worth your time and effort and, 2. How much competition is there. Why don’t we start with how much traffic you’ll need.

Whenever dealing with the level of website traffic you would like for any keyword to end up being well worth your time and effort to try to rank for I generally try to find keywords that have 100 queries a day or more which translates into 3000 per month.The following is ESSENTIAL: you must get these numbers in “exact match”! Not “phrase match” or “broad match” but only “exact match”. There are massive differences with the results you receive and nothing but “exact match”, as it’s title suggests, lets you know the exact amount of traffic a specific keyword gets.

As for competition this is where the actual SEO comes into play and it will be up to you to decide what level of competition you are willing to go up against. You are going to need to analyze the sites that are on the first page of Google to determine the competitiveness of your chosen keyword, a good keyword tool will make this job much easier.

Forget about the competing number of pages you find by searching the phrase in “quotes”. You hear many people say to look for terms with less than “30,000″ or “50,000″ competing pages but this is not the way measure competition. All that tells you is how many sites have the phrase on a page of their site. This is not a measure of how hard or easy it will be to get on the first page.

Look at the sites already on the first page. You’ll need to know how many back-links to the page they have plus the anchor text for those back-links, this is what’s most important. You will also want to to consider on-page components, do they have the keyword in the Title, description, URL and Headlines? Also important is page rank and .edu/.gov back-links.These things will tell you how much work it will take to rank for that keyword.Follow this for the best SEO course.