Keyword research is one of the most important activities in search marketing. Through this process you not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about how your buyer personas use the web to solve their problems.

With keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are already actively looking.

Keywords are fundamental to the search process, they are the building blocks of language and of search.

The search process:

When a search is performed, the search engine knows which pages to retrieve based on the words entered into the search box (the search  engines have millions and millions of smaller databases, each centered on a particular keyword term or phrase).

1. Step 1: The search engine receives a query from a person
2. Step 2: The search engine find the relevant data base (search engines have millions and millions of smaller databases, each centered on a particular keyword term or phrase)
3. Step 3: The search engines rank the documents based on different variables
4. Step 4: The search engines return the search results to the person

1. To Know your target audience: the best way to do this is by creating buyer personas, personas is a short biography of the typical customer. It comments on the buyer’s background, daily activities, and how they deal with their current set of problems. The more experience you have in your market, the more obvious the personas become.

2. Do the homework: ask yourself if the keyword you have chosen is relevant to the content your website offers?, will searchers who find your site through this term find the likely answer to their question?, will this traffic result in achieving your business goals directly or indirectly?.

3. Search for the term/phrase in the major search engines: are there search advertisements running along the top and right hand side of the organic results?.

4. Check online resources from major search engines like Google insights for search and Bing keyword research tool

The areas that you need to consider are:

• Page Title
• Heading
• Sub headings
• Alt tags for images
• URL of the page