Like a foundation for a building, there is one aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that is more important than any other. Without this foundation, you may be wasting all your time and resources. Proper keyword research should be the basis of your optimization.

Why is Keyword Research Critical?
Keyword research determines which keywords you should be targeting with the SEO. Most people think that they know which keywords they should target. Instinct can be a great resource, but it can also be misleading and is almost always not enough. For example, “search engine optimization” gets an estimated 13,000 searches a day while “search engine marketing” gets an estimated 1,100 searches a day. If your gut tells you to target “search engine marketing”, you may get great rankings, but it would only get you a fraction of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for “search engine optimization”. There are also keywords that you may not be able to rank well for without a lot of time and significant amount of link building regardless of how well you optimize your site. In addition, there are keywords that other people will use to search for what your site offers that you would never even think of. So, in addition to letting you know which keywords are more popular, the research can also provide new keywords to target.

Drawing on the analogy in our search marketing parable, optimizing your website without first doing keyword research is like trying to pick apples from a tree without first checking to see if there are any apples on it or if the apples are within your reach. You could end up putting in a lot of effort but going home with little fruit from your labor.

What Do I Research?
There are two main aspects to keyword research. The first is popularity, how often are keywords actually searched for. Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo, and MSN don’t share the actual number of searches for specific keywords; however, there are a few tools online which are generally thought to be pretty accurate. They use the search data from a number of other smaller search engines along with a few algorithms to predict how many searches are being made for specific keywords. It’s not perfect, but it gives you an idea of which keywords are most popular.

The second aspect to keyword research is competition research. Competition research starts with analyzing your web pages to determine how competitive your site is both in general and for specific keywords. This is sometimes referred to as page strength. I should note that there are really two aspects to page strength, the general strength of a site and the specific strength of a page within the site. For the sake of simplicity, in this article I will use “web page” for both. The next step is to examine the keywords themselves to see how competitive they are. This is sometimes called keyword difficulty. Determining keyword difficulty is done partially by examining how competitive the pages are that rank well for this keyword, though other methods can be helpful as well. This can be tricky for two reasons.

1. No one other than that search engine designers knows how each search engine determines how competitive a site or page is and the search engine folks aren’t talking.
2. Each search engine has a different way of determining how competitive a site or page is. So, even if you could figure out one, it wouldn’t necessarily be so with the other search engines.

Despite these difficulties the search engines do give us some general information about what makes web pages competitive (what determines page strength).

Understanding Competition:
The competitive strength of a web page is determined by several factors including:

• Age – Generally speaking, the older a site is, the more value the search engines give it. New sites have a much harder time competing for keywords. Similarly, new pages start off less competitive, but, if the rest of your site is strong, new pages will quickly gain page strength.
• Traffic – The more popular a site is, the more value the search engines give it. Getting more visitors (web traffic) to a website increases page strength.
• Internal Linking Structure – The internal linking structure of a site is both a reference to the navigation menus and other forms of linking from one page of your site to another. This is an often-overlooked aspect of both site design and SEO. Don’t underestimate the value of a good internal link structure.
• Inbound Links – The most prominent piece of the competition puzzle, inbound links (also called back links and incoming links) are a key component in determining a web page’s competitive strength. Generally, the more inbound links you have the better, but quantity isn’t as important as quality. Links from authoritative sites (Sites that are very competitive) are worth far more than links from lesser sites, and links from sites relevant to your keywords are worth more than links from unrelated sites. Also, you do not only need to consider the inbound links to the specific page you are optimizing. The links directed to other pages of your website will increase the overall competitive strength of the website and thus the individual pages of that site as well. (We’ll talk more about this in a future article on link building.)

These are some of the key elements to determining a page’s competitive strength. As you can see this is starting to get complicated. There are some online tools available to help, but there is a wide range of ideas about what is important and how important each element is. Instead of using just one tool, you may want to use several. It will take longer, but may give you a more accurate assessment. In the end, if you keep track of your keyword research and your results, you may find one tool is more accurate than the others and be able to trust that tool over the others. This can help you determine how competitive your page or site is and whether you have a chance at ranking well for a particular keyword at this time. By looking at how competitive the other web pages are that currently rank well for a keyword, you can compare that to how competitive your page is. If your page is about as competitive as the other sites, you should be able to rank well for that keyword after optimizing your page. If the other sites are stronger than your site, then you should choose less competitive keywords until you’ve improved the strength of your web page. If the other sites are weaker, then the keyword is a sitting duck.

Other Ways to Determine Keyword Difficulty:
Adwords: In addition to evaluating the other web pages competing for the keywords you want, it can be helpful when attempting to determine how competitive a keyword is to look at other sources such as pay-per-click search marketing stats. Google Adwords has a tool that will show you the estimated cost per click to rank well in the paid search results for a keyword. If that cost per click is high, that’s an indication the keyword difficulty is high as well (it’s also an indication that the keyword is valuable).
Keyword Effectiveness Index: Another way some people determine keyword difficulty is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). KEI values are usually available with keyword popularity tools. The KEI compares the number of searches a keyword gets to the number of results that keyword brings up in a search engine. If a keyword gets 100 searches a day and a search on Google returns 1000 results, then the Google KEI will be high, indicating the keyword is probably worth targeting. On the other hand if a keyword gets 100 searches a day and a search on Google returns 1,000,000 results, the Google KEI will be much lower, indicating the keyword may not be worth targeting. A lower search popularity will also effect the KEI Keywords with the same number of results in Google will have a higher or lower Google KEI depending on whether the keyword gets searched for more or less, respectively.

Tip: KEI can be used as part of the keyword difficulty research; however, I don’t recommend using solely this information as it isn’t necessarily an accurate indication of how difficult ranking for a keyword will be. After all, just because 100,000 pages are returned as results for a keyword, it doesn’t mean they are strong pages and it doesn’t mean any of the pages are well optimized for that keyword. A keyword could have 100,000 weak sites in the results. So, it could be easy to rank well for that keyword. Similarly, a keyword could have only 1000 sites in the results, but if 100 of them are very strong sites, then ranking well for that keyword could be very difficult

How do I do Keyword Research?
Manually gathering all the information needed for keyword research would be prohibitively time consuming and in some cases, such as keyword popularity, impossible. Thankfully, there are people out there willing to help in a variety of ways. Some tools are free and others are not.

Keyword Popularity:
There are two commonly used keyword popularity tools:

• WordTracker (fee)
• Keyword Discovery (fee)

These are both online tools that access a database of search data from smaller search engines. Each has a monthly fee, but keyword popularity info is pretty much impossible to come by for free.

Page Strength:
There are several tools available for helping determining a page’s competitive strength. Here are a few options:

• SEOmoz’s Page Strength Tool (fee)
• LifeTips Page Strength Tool (free)

LifeTips Page Strength Tool is currently free, but, as is often the case, you get what you pay for. SEOmoz’s tool is much better.

Keyword Difficulty:

• SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool (fee)
• SEOChat’s Keyword Difficulty Tool (free)
• Google Adwords Cost Per Click Research Tool (free)
• WordTracker’s KEI Tool (fee)
• Keyword Discovery’s KEI Tool (fee)

WordTracker and Keyword Discovery both offer the KEI information with their popularity research tool.

Professional SEO Experts:
By now you may be thinking, “This is a bit over my head.” or “I don’t have time for all this.” Thankfully there are people who do this for a living. Hiring a professional SEO will save you a lot of time that would be spent learning how to do keyword research and then actually doing it. And assuming you hire a good one, they should be able to do it better than you can on your own. One potential downside of hiring a professional SEO could be the cost, but if you consider the cost to purchase all tools you’ll need just to research one site, hiring someone who already has the tools may actually end up being less expensive.

If you decide to hire someone to do keyword research or the entire SEO process, make sure you find someone who has been doing it for while. This industry has its share of “fly by night” companies. There are “professional” search engine optimizers who are really nothing more than a guy who just bought a book and set up a website and then there are companies with years of experience and practice at getting results. It may cost a little more, but if you go with the people with the experience, it will pay off in the end.

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Tags: keyword research, keywords, optimization, Search Engine Optimization, search marketing, SEO