Nett Knowledge Blog

You might have heard the term "keyword research" in different networking circles or from your web designer who may have mentioned to you about it for optimizing your website. But keyword research is a topic that is somewhat confusing to many business owners who are trying to create their online presence and hence they often ignore its importance.

Firstly, lets start with explaining what keyword research is and then what it could mean to your business if you have it implemented correctly.

Keyword research is the use of descriptive words in your websites copy that relate exactly back to the industry or niche that you operate in. The effective implementation of keyword research on your website and blog means that you will rank more often and higher in local, national and international searches that your potential clients are looking for in Google, Yahoo, Bing, MSN and many other smaller search engines.

There's many layers to keyword research and by no means is this article designed to help you understand SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or keyword research at any great depth, it's just an overview so that you know what exactly keyword research can do for your online business or website.

There are basically three types of categories in keyword research, the broad, the semi-specific and the very specific / descriptive keywords.

They call the more descriptive keywords "long tail" keywords and they aren't broad in nature they're very specific, for example:

Broad Keywords:
Networking
Cars
Boats
Makeup

Semi-Broad Keywords:
Business Networking
Computer Networking
Red Cars
Holden Cars
Speed Boats
Dark Makeup

Specific Long Tail Keywords:
Online Business Networking
Business Networking for Salespeople
Office Business Networking
Red Holden Convertible Cars
Buy Yamaha Speed Boats
Aloe Very Dark Makeup Solution

As you can see when you're doing your keyword research, you need to start with specific keywords, and work your way back.

For example, the broad keyword would be the site concept "Cars", the menu buttons are the semi-broad keywords "Red Cars", "Holden Cars", "Fast Cars", and then once a visitor to these menu buttons click on them, they see the specific categories under each.

So as you can see, with keyword research you need to build your website based around broad theme, to the specific.

Your keyword research will ensure that you optimize your site in a way that ensures it gets ranked well and quickly, as a lot of the specific long tail words aren't very competitive, giving you the advantage.

You're going to need a keyword research tool of some type to get your keyword list, the most common one is Google keyword research tool.

However if you're looking for a great paid keyword research tool, Wordtracker.com or Keyword Samurai are great choices and give you massive insight into more advanced keyword research.

So I hope that this article has given you some good ideas and will help you understand keyword research and it's importance a little more in depth.

I will be expanding more on keyword research tools, advanced strategies and implementations around optimizing your keyword research findings very soon.