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Keyword research is essential to the development of a profitable website.  The goal for every business with a website is to attract more customers online and every webmaster wants to drive traffic to his website via quality content and articles.  The way to increase traffic to your website or blog is through search engine optimization (SEO).

Keyword research is the critical first step webmasters must take when considering what content to provide on the website or blog. Keywords are used within the content of your on-page text to tell both the visitor or reader and the search engine spiders what your article is about.  Search engines extract these keywords from your on-page text, headers, page titles, inbound links and other factors.  Choosing the right keywords can mean the difference between ranking high in the search engines and getting found or ranking low and receiving very little traffic.

When researching keywords, it is important to make sure that keyword terms or phrases have a large search volume.  If there are not enough people searching using a particular keyword term or phrase, then there will not be enough traffic driven to your website.  No traffic, means no profit.  Keywords must then be filtered for relevancy. You don’t just want to pull in traffic; you want to ensure that your traffic is of high quality. Quality traffic helps you convert your visitors into customers at a higher rate.

There are several keyword research tools that are free and there are also some research services that require a fee.  Some examples of free tools can be found here:

1. SEO Tools
2. Build Traffic
3. Wordtracker

Other keyword research tools provide great information, but charge a fee to use the software or service.  Some of these tools can be found here:

1. Buyer Keywords Generator
2. Keyword Explosion
3. Keyword Junkies

Once you have completed your initial keyword research, you can create a  keyword opportunity list containing all the possible keyword ideas. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool can be helpful in generating variations of your keywords and phrases from your opportunity list.  Again, once you have an initial keyword list containing all the keyword variations, this list will need to be filtered for search volume and relevancy .

This new list will then be assessed for keyword competiveness.  If a keyword is highly competitive, it may be too difficult to rank well in the search engines.  Try using the SEO Chat Keyword Difficulty Tool to determine how competitive a keyword or phrase is and how it ranks.

Keyword research is an extremely important step in the process of starting and developing a website.  Be sure to take time to adequately explore this step.  If keyword research is done properly, it is much more likely that you will have a successful, and even more importantly, profitable website.