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If you want your website found on the web, keyword research is the first step. Well, actually, the first step is deciding what products and services your website will sell and then actually building a website, but in between those two, keyword research has to be conducted. It means finding out what your potential clients are searching for online.

The thousands of terms people use to search for things related to your industry online will help you target your pay per click advertising and other web marketing, as well as help your SEO efforts (especially so you know what anchor text to use when link building). The wider your subject and more services or products your provide, the more in-depth your keyword research will get, sometimes resulting in lists tens of thousands of words long.

Much of keyword research is just old-fashioned brainstorming. You sit down, think about your target audience and get in their frame of mind. Think about the types of things they might type in to find your service, and get yourself a general list of several terms. Once you have that together there are one of two ways to conduct keyword research - this is where the ’secret’ comes in.

The more traditional way to generate keyword lists and conduct keyword research is to use online tools and software. Google’s keyword tool will give you a list of keywords related to the terms you entered as well as related terms you may want to consider. There is also software you can purchase that will search several keyword tools on the Net, including Google’s, Yahoo’s, WordTracker and even find common misspellings of your keywords so you can target those with your search marketing as well.

If you’re doing keyword research in order to target your pay per click campaigns, there is a way to save yourself some time. You may even wind up saving money in the long run. It’s just a matter of experimenting a bit with your search-marketing program of choice.

If you have a bit of extra cash to spend, you can do your keyword research in a whole different way. Take your original list of several terms and begin building a campaign around them (this works for both Google, Yahoo and other search marketing affiliates). Most search marketing programs have the option of using a “broad” keyword match - meaning whatever combination of search terms somebody types in, as long as it contains your keyword, your ad will pop up for them.

You can spend some money by running your test campaign for a week or two, and wind up actually cutting the manpower hours your keyword research takes in half. Using the analytics software most search marketing programs provide, you can track which keywords led people to click on your actual ads. Than you can add keywords and tweak your campaign as necessary, to get the most for your marketing, eventually cutting out broad match keywords for exact matches.

Keyword research can sound daunting, especially for newcomers, but practice makes perfect, and this tip can wind up saving you a lot of trouble and time. In the long run, it should also help you target your keywords to your audience better, get you higher conversion rates and hopefully save some money. It’s always important to try something for yourself before you rule it out entirely!

Last 5 posts by Ashley Lichty

• the secret to customer loyalty building - March 1st, 2008
• Raise Your Property Value Sky High - January 30th, 2008

Tags: Internet Marketing