I think that keyword research is the first and most important task that you should do before you go create the content for your web site. It’s very important to know your keywords because you’ll know what titles and what words to use when developing the actual content. The keyword research process can start very easy and can become a little bit complicated along the way.
The first thing you should do is define what your site is about – what is the main theme. Write it down, talk to other people just so you can let your ideas evolve and make you understand what you really want. Often you want to do something and you don’t know how to start. The web site design doesn’t always has to refer to design as in graphics : planning keywords, pages, content, navigation – all these are design elements that play a big part in the success of your website.
Make use of anything that could ease up the process for you : paper, colors, boards, anything. Once you are through this process you should have a clear image about what / how your web site should look like and what is the main topic. Now that you know what you want to talk about you should start asking yourself the question : “for what words I would like the search engine to find my web site ? “. Try to use a group of 3 words for the main title of your web site.
People usually write down 3 words followed by a zone name maybe. After you’ve established the group of 3 words do a search on that. If the results are by the order of millions then it will be pretty hard to make it to no 1 in SERP’s. So a way to get out of this situation is to target first words that are less heavy in the SEARP count.
You can start with keywords that have results numbered in less then 1 million. There are a few tools that can help you chose keywords that are related to your main topic. This is another way to get diversity in your keywords by the use of similar expressions, slang, synonyms.
Few of these tools are (I’m sure that you can find more with a little search on Google) : http://keyworddiscovery.com/ , http://www.wordtracker.com/ (offers a great tool but you’ll have to pay for it), http://goodkeywords.com/ (they have a few free tools that you can download) , http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ (a great tool that also has a video tutorial on what those fields mean) and https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal from Google
Another very important thing to check : even if the SERP count is 10 millions for a keyword but when you do a search like title:”word1 word2 word3” you realize that are only 10.000 results then you should have a page with that exact title. The reason is that the search engines look first for a domain that has the name like the search and then the most important thing is the tittle of the page specified with the meta tag TITLE and then used in the article with a h1 meta tag also. And the beauty is that the title with the h1 tag doesn’t have to look like an h1 tag : you can fully customize the appearance on the web page by using the CSS.
Once you’ve established the keywords you’re gonna use and the strategy then you have to realize and to be aware that all your article should be conceived with those keyword in mind: starting from the title and going down to the actual page elements.
Another thing to take into consideration is the keyword relevance for your web site. So, a basic rule is never to use generic keywords or keywords that have multiple meanings. The more specific the search, the more relevance in the keywords used. The rule is simple : you want people to get to your web site and to make traffic but if you sell computers there is no use to you if one that searched for “computer hacks” or “computer course” gets to your site. Maybe you would be more interested in searches like “cheap computer parts” or “computer components” to place your web site on the first page of Google.