SEO is critical to your website’s success, but if your site is targeting the wrong keywords, you are doomed for failure.
Keyword Research Background Info
Keyword research revolves around finding the perfect keywords (or key phrases which refers to the same thing as keywords) for your website to target. For example, one of the key phrases my website targets is “web maintenance Tanzania “. Some keywords are more competitive than others. You can tell how competitive a keyword is by doing a Google search. Searching the key phrase “web developer” in Google results in over 129,000,000 web pages!  (Searching with quotes around your key phrase tells Google to provide only web pages that have all the words that are within your quotes. If you don’t use quotes, Google will include results that only match part of the key phrase.) If I targeted my website for the key phrase “web developer”, I would be competing with 129,000,000 web pages and I would have no chance for success. Keyword research is picking the battles you want to fight and you only want to pick battles you can win which is why having a good keyword tool is so important.
Keyword Tools
There are tools that give you valuable insights on the number of searches a keyword recieves a month, where it receives those searches (in which country/state/city), and the competition in general. Using the right keyword tool when doing your keyword research is extremely important.
Keyword Strategies
There are many books written on ways to pick keywords and ways to use those keywords on your website. I’ve read a ton of books on the subject and have never really been impressed by what I’ve read. A couple weeks ago I stumbled upon 50 Keyword Strategies.