subject: Keyword Research - The Untapped Seo Tool [print this page] There seems to be a current craze going around the search engine optimization circles where everything seems to be about backlinks.
We need to get as many backlinks to our websites and web pages as possible because that means we will rank higher for the terms we are targeting.
Now I am not having a go at these people, because I believe that backlinks definitely are important. However, unless our pages are optimized and we know that people are searching for the keywords we are building backlinks for - it will all be pointless.
Countless times I have seen people building links to what I would term 'trophy keywords'. These are keywords that might impress people if they heard you were ranking number one on Google for it, but if you did the keyword research you would find that maybe one or two people search for that keyword a day.
This is why I see keyword research as a vital part of search engine optimization. Because right from the start we already know how many people are searching for that keyword each and every day - which allows us to estimate the traffic that we would receive it we were to rank number one for that keyword.
By knowing the traffic that we can generate, it allows us to then decide if the effort it would take to rank for that keyword would be worth the results that we would achieve (which would be different for each keyword).
Search engine optimization is like a rope made up to three threads, keyword research, onpage seo and off page seo. If you have strength in two of these threads but the third is weak, as soon as you put any strain on that rope (keyword), it will snap and you will be right down the bottom of the search rankings.
This is why keyword research is so important as it can make or break your seo campaign.
