ntroduction No matter what kind of business activities you undertake on the internet, there is one fundamental fact that cannot be ignored. Whether you're promoting internet marketing products, or selling blue widgets from a sales enabled website, you cannot hope to be successful unless people visit your website. However, having just anybody visit your site is not enough. In order for your business to be successful, you must attract site viewers who are interested in the product or service that you are promoting or selling. In other words, your visitors must be targeted prospects. For example, if you are the biggest supplier of blue widgets in your locality, it is not going to help your business if everybody who visits your site is only interested in buying red or green widgets. Similarly, if your site is promoting an internet marketing product that is related to selling on eBay, you’re not going to make many sales if the people who visit your site are interested in advanced search engine optimization techniques. Of course, you do not necessarily want to stop people visiting your site. Even visitors who initially have no interest whatsoever in your product or service may be convinced to do business with you if you have an effective sales page related to a product that they gradually begin to see a use for. However, most of your sales and success will be based upon targeted visitors landing on your site. Keyword research is fundamentally important to the process of driving targeted visitors to your website. They say that the success of your business ventures online is predicated on how successful you are in your keyword research efforts. There are many different ways of undertaking effective keyword research. ‘The Keyword Research Bible’ contains many of them. Many of the methods that you are about to read of are free, and for most people these free tools are more than adequate. There are, however, some more advanced keyword research resources listed later in this book that will cost you money. However, given the importance of good keyword research to the overall success of your business, any money that you spend on the best tools is always going to represent money well spent. Why is keyword research important? Keyword research is all about forcing the search engines to find your website. The vast majority of people who search on the internet do so using search engines like Google or Yahoo!, and you therefore need to make these search engines find your site as often as possible. Although things are rapidly changing, the search engines are still overwhelmingly text based. In other words, they read the words on the page, and to a large extent they ignore graphics and video. However, Google in particular is very keen on ranking video materials as well. This is indicative of another important factor about the search engines, which is that they are constantly adapting their practices to match ever-changing markets. At this moment, however, search engines are overwhelmingly text based search tools, so Flash or Shockwave videos on your site count for nothing with the engines. This despite the fact that your human visitors may love them! All the major search engines use ‘algorithms’ to decide how highly they will rate any website that they analyze. Such algorithms are essentially programs (spiders) that can 'read' the words on your page, and then index that particular page based upon what these words tell them the page is about, and how they value it. A properly constructed webpage will be focused on a particular keyword or phrase. Making sure that this happens is the concern of those who are involved in the art of ‘search engine optimization’ (SEO). The first step in the SEO process is to find the keywords or phrases that are going to be most effective for driving targeted traffic to the webpage in question. Secondly, the webpage will be constructed around that particular keyword or phrase in order to make sure that the search engine ‘spiders’ realize that this is the phrase you want to be ranked for. Keyword research must therefore be the most fundamental and vital ingredient of creating a webpage that the search engines will visit, analyze and hopefully love. When a search engine spider visits your page, it is looking for the most important terms you are using, so that whenever any web searcher types the same term into the search box, the engine shows them your site page. In this way, the search engine helps to send targeted visitors to your site. 4 It is, therefore, extremely important to use the correct and most appropriate keyword term when building your webpage. Do this, and over time you will be able to drive an increasing number of targeted visitors to your site, and if you are selling a product or service, then you will inevitably increase sales at the same time. Starting big, and digging down We have already established that the majority of people who were searching on the internet do so by using a search engine. There are, however, two different types of searcher: • The first type is somebody who is just looking for general information and has no specific target or objective in mind. For example, somebody who just wants to learn more about German Shepherd dogs would most probably simply use the phrase 'German Shepherds’. This would do no more than indicate a general broad interest in this particular breed of dog. • If, however, somebody searched Google or Yahoo using the phrase ‘German Shepherd trainer in Kansas’, then they have clearly indicated that they have a very specific requirement which they are seeking to satisfy. If you happened to be someone who ran a business training German Shepherd dogs in Kansas, you would have every reason to want this particular searcher to visit your website, because you clearly provide exactly the service that they are considering using. The majority of searchers tend to begin their searching activities using a very broad phrase (‘German Shepherds’) before progressively narrowing it down to find exactly what they want. This generally happens because the first search results page that they are presented with does not provide them with the results or the information that they are looking for. They will therefore keep refining the search term that they are using until the search engine shows them the webpages that contain the information that they really want. For most people who are selling or promoting online, it is unrealistic to expect the search engines to find their website when the searcher is using a very broad generic phrase. This is because the broader the search term is, the more results are going to be returned by the search engine. The Google search engine page shows that there are nearly a million results for this particular broad generic term. It is therefore going to be extremely difficult for any new websites to feature on the all-important first page of Google results if they try to do so using this term. If, however, we were to use a far more specific term, then the result is very different: Clearly, it is not going to be very difficult to be ranked at search position number one for this particular phrase, thereby guaranteeing that anyone looking for a trainer in Kansas on the internet would turn to you. You might ask whether anybody is actually searching the net using that particular term, and the answer is - apparently not now! According to Google's statistics, more than 40% of search terms used to query their own search engine every day are brand new. In other words, in every 24 hour period, 40% of searches are run using phrases that nobody has ever searched on before.

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