Tej Kohli Explains the Importance of Keyword research in SEO

Tej Kohli believes that just like a strong foundation is essential for making a building, keyword research is one of the most important and crucial aspects of Search Engine Optimization. Without a proper keyword research, all your efforts and time may go in vain. Before starting the optimization process, its important that you do a careful and through research and choose your keywords wisely.

Why is Keyword Research so Crucial?

A proper keyword research helps you determine which keywords you should be targeting with the SEO. A lot of people make the mistake of selecting keywords based on their own understanding. They believe that they know the keywords they should be targeting. Though instinct can be a great guide, it can also be misleading at times. For instance, the phrase 'search engine optimization' gets an estimated 16000 searches per day while the phrase 'search engine marketing' gets approximately 8800 searches per day. Now your instinct may tell you to target the later, because the competition is less and you may get good rankings, but it would only get you half the traffic that you could have, if you had chosen and ranked well for 'search engine optimization'.

Furthermore, you may not be able to rank well for certain keywords if you don't put in significant efforts and time. Some keywords require dedicated link building to rank well, despite of how well you optimize your site. Additionally, there are some other keywords that people will use to look for what your website offers that wouldn't even cross your mind. So, besides letting you know the popular keyword trends, the research can also give you new keyword ideas.

What to Research?

There are two primary components of keyword research, the first is popularity, how frequently the keywords are looked up for. Leading search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN don't share the real number of searches for particular keywords. Fortunately, there are many online tools that gives you pretty accurate figures, and Google too offers a free tool that gives the 'approximate' number of searches for a keyword. It may not be the perfect tool, but is gives you an idea of which keywords are most popular. Tej Kohli advices you to use both Google and some alternate keyword popularity tool and compare the results, before picking your targeted keywords.

The second main component of keyword research is competition research. It begins with analyzing the web pages to figure out how competitive your website is for both general and exclusive keywords. In SEO parlance we often call it page strength. Basically, there are two parameters to page strength – the general strength of the site, and the strength of a particular inner page. The next important step in keyword research is to examine the keyword itself and see how competitive it is. This is often referred to as keyword difficulty. A keyword's difficulty can be partially determined by verifying how competitive the pages are that rank well for a particular keyword. But it can be tricky, the reasons being:

1.Only search engine designers know how every search engine works and determine whether a site or page is competitive or not. We can never get access to that information.

2.Every search engine has its own way of ascertaining how competition a site or page is. So, even if you get hold of one, it is not necessary that other search engines would also work the same way.

In spite of these problems the search engines do provide us some general information about how to make a site competitive.

'Without a good keyword research your search engine optimization efforts will be like shooting an arrow in the dark', says Tej Kohli. There is no guarantee as to what you will get. At times you may pick keywords that are not searched for or keywords that are way too competitive for your site to rank well. Its is your interest to know what you need to be targeting.