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Why Keyword Research Is So Important To Search Engine Rankings

Whether you’re launching a new site or writing an article to distribute, performing thorough keyword research before you start is essential.

The keyword phrases you choose to target in your content need to attract reasonable numbers of searches each month, whilst at the same time not having too much in the way of competition, otherwise you won’t be able to rank for them very easily, and you simply won’t get any traffic.

Now, not all keywords are created equally.  The secret is to identify the gems that attract plenty of traffic but have not “really” been targeted by other marketers. What exactly do I mean by the term "really" targeted?

Well there are several ways to analyse competition.

If you do a basic search in Google, you will likely see millions of results apparently returned, and the idea of competing with all of those sites may be a little daunting!

But if you surround your search phrase with inverted commas and search again, you should see the number of results vastly reduced.  This type of search only returns competing pages that include the keyword phrase somewhere in the page text, whereas the first search may return pages that include some or all of the words in the phrase at various places in their content.

Finally, if you place the following text in front of your phrase search, allintitle: , you will only see pages returned that have your keyword phrase in their page title.  This really indicates your real competition for your phrase.

The page title is the most important piece of on page search engine optimisation that there is.  If you want to rank for a particular keyword phrase, place it in your page title for sure. When I see less than 1000 pages returned for an allintitle phrase search, I know that i have a really excellent chance of ranking very well for the phrase without having to get too many back links to do so.

When analysing how competitive a keyword phrase is, I always look at how many sites have the phrase in a page title, it gives a strong feel for how many sites are really optimising for the phrase.

Keyword Elite 2, Brad Callen’s awesome software, produces a report for all the keywords you select showing monthly traffic generated by the keyword versus the number of competing pages that have the phrase included in their page titles.

So literally, within just a few minutes you can identify the best keywords for your site from 1,000s of keywords related to your niche!

So you can see that not all keywords are created equal, and therefore your keyword research will have a huge effect on how successful your sites are.

Click on this link to see how I incorporate keyword research in to my highly successful niche marketing plan.

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