What Most SEO Beginners Overlook
SEM General, SEO General July 9th. 2007, 10:32pmYour main goal for SEO is to increase SERP’s, bring quality traffic that makes you money. However a lot of people who are just starting out in the world of SEO fail to look at what I think the most important factor is, keyword research. I have read debates that state what is more important to improving your ranking with the search engines and most have made great points. However, they failed to mention something that is more important then any factors they had listed. Keyword research will determine the direction your SEO campaign will go before you even create the website. What you might think is a great keyword or key phrase, the actual searches being done each month are a lot lower then you expected. Imaging this scenario is heartbreaking for a lot of people because I bet it has happened. You spend a lot of hours optimizing your website for your keywords, your site ranks well for those keywords and yet your traffic has hardly moved. All that hard work, patience and perseverance for your keywords has resulted in low traffic and not many sales. Now you sit back and think to yourself everything you did worked because your rankings show for it. You just cannot figure out where the traffic is now that you have that good ranking.
Before you start any SEO campaign, you need to not just make a keyword or keyphrase list, you need to research them. When you research what you are trying to optimize for, almost every time you will come up with new keywords to use in your SEO campaign. You will find things that are searched for quite a bit that maybe your competition isn’t using. That is the main goal when researching, what can I use that is getting a good amount of searches each month that the competition really isn’t using yet? This way you can determine what keywords to optimize your website for ahead of time. If you would have done this from the start of your SEO campaign then all the hard work you put into it would not have to be corrected. Now you have to change the content wording, title tags, meta tags, alt tags, heading tags, contact all the sites you have links on to change the anchor text. All of this could have been avoided if you had researched your keywords ahead of time. I know you want your website to make you a lot of money, we all do, that is the point of being in business. Just remember though a little research can go a long way and save you a great deal of time in the end.
Here is a small list of tools you can use to research your keywords. You will notice that I did not list the Overture Keyword Tool. I feel it is no longer accurate to use since it is no longer being updated and the results are from January 2007.
