Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is paramount for businesses that choose to make themselves known via the Internet.

Keyword research and, ultimately, keyword selection are extremely important parts of the overall SEO process. You should always be aware that keyword selection is fundamental.  Choosing keywords that people might not use to find your site and your products/services will not get you the expected traffic.

Then how to choose effective keywords and get more traffic for your pr? Although we use a variety of methods, the two basic methods, and arguably the most efficient, is to look at what your competitors are doing and to use a couple of the keyword tools currently on the internet. Here are a few steps for you to follow.

1. Keyword Tools

There are a few keyword tools on the internet, with our favourites being the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and the paid version of Word Tracker (http://www.wordtracker.com).

For example, if you were selling property investments, you would type property investment into one of these keyword research tools. You would then be given a list of the keywords and the search volumes for each of them. Whereas it would take you a long time to rank top of Google for Property Investment, you can use the produced list to look for long tail alternatives and therefore focus on them.

2. Competitor Research

A good way of finding out about keywords, you could and possibly should be using is to take a look at what your competitors are doing. Simply choose a keyword, type it into Google and make a spreadsheet of your competitors and the Title, Description and Keywords they use in their tags. I would recommend doing this for the first ten results, or the first ten most relevant results if you only want to feature your competitors and not necessarily any website that is ranking.

If you do this for the top ten, you can then see straight away all of the keywords they are using, and you can then use this help plan your keywords, but do not copy them or simply duplicate them, use the information to try and capture the same search terms but mix in some of your own and use your own unique combinations.

3. Plan Keywords

Once you have your data from the keyword research tools and your competitor research, you can then begin to plan your keywords. As previously mentioned, you do not have to just focus on your main keyword. Use the research to pick out smaller, long tail keywords that are less competitive.

By doing this you might be appealing to less searchers, but you have more of a chance of ranking highly for the search term.

It is better to come on the first page for a search term that might get 2,000 searches a month than page 20 for something that gets 20,000. All of the research you carry out will allow you to start aiming for some of the lesser searched keywords, whilst still making sure you are focusing on your main keywords, which will just take longer to get high rankings in Google for, if they are very, very popular and competitive.

4. Trends Monitoring

If you want to perform an analysis and a comparison of the searchability of your selected keywords, then you can use Google Trends, which analyzes a portion of the Google web searches and calculates how many searches have been done for the terms that you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. A graph is displayed where you can see the interest taken in your keywords. Use this information to make adjustments and to improve your keyword selection and placement strategy.

5. Analytics

Keep track of your visitors and the performance of your keywords by using Google Analytics. Don’t think that you will do great from the very beginning. Keyword placement is a process that never stops. Analyze your results and learn from your mistakes. Also, keep experimenting based on the results that you get. To gain more experience and knowledge, regularly check forums and consult people with experience. There’s always something to learn or work on.