You can have the best SEO company working on your campaign but if you are not ranking for the right keywords you will not achieve the intended results. Keyword research is one of the main ingredients to a successful SEO campaign and when proper keyword research is paired with on-site optimization and a diverse link profile your search engine results pages will drive heavy traffic to your site.
Use Keyword Research Tools:
There are so many tools available that it can be a task just finding the right one. Sites like Wordtracker.com and SEObook.com allow you to try before you buy with a free trial and have an SEO tool box that includes keyword research and link building tools.
Most of these tool suites offer more features when you sign up for the paid subscription. A great place to start is Google. Google is the leading search engine in the world so it's safe to say they know something about search. Start your keyword research with the Google Keyword Tool. With a few searches you can compile a list of short tail and long tail keyword terms. Short tale would be the shorter search phrases and the long tail covers the more specific search terms.
Track Your Keywords:
A large part of search engine optimization and search engine marketing is taking the data you collect and making changes to reflect your findings. There is no value or return on investment when you ranking for keywords that your target marketing is not searching for. Google Analytics is one the best tools on the internet to gain useful feedback. The GA dashboard can generate up to 85 different reports to analyze large amounts of data. You can track almost any aspect of your website through Google analytics.
Find Out Who Your Competitors Are:
This is a step called competitive analysis. Who is ranking #1 for your ideal keyword term? How did they get there? What is keeping you from reaching that #1 spot?
The best tool to analyze your competition is Yahoo Site Explorer. Site explorer is a tool that allows you to see your competitors link profile and get a better idea of how strong their incoming links are, which pages of their site are the strongest or which pages are generating the highest links. This is information that can really help you develop a linking strategy and a content development strategy.
Another tool that is very useful for analyzing your competition is the Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz.org. SEOmoz offers a handful of helpful free tools as well as, a Pro membership that includes members only SEO tools, articles and content.
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