SEO Explained - Page 2
Keyword Research

Sometimes the words that you think you want to rank well in the search engine results  for, may not be the best ones to choose.  Whatever the product or service that you offer to customers, there’s likely to be a myriad of different terms that people will search for in order to find these types of products and services.

Example:  
If you sell Nike Sneakers, then words that you might wish to rank well for might include :
•    Nike Running Shoes
•    Running Shoes
•    Nike Runners
•    Nike Shoes
•    Sneakers
•    Sneakers Melbourne   (If you are located in Melbourne, i.e. a local target market).

So, when optimising your website, this optimisation work is done against specific keywords or keyword phrases that a user might be searching for.
Secondly, you don’t optimise a website, you optimise individual pages on your website.

This optimisation can be done for one or many keywords on each page – so you can see, that you need to think about which pages on your site that you want to optimise for which keywords.   Ideally you would optimise every page (and I would strongly recommend you do), but depending on how much content you have this may not be practical and you might need to prioritise certain important pages first.  So how do you go about it?

First, choose a long list of potential keywords.
There are lots of ways to find a good list of potential keywords – we’ll outline a few here.

Method 1- Google Keyword Suggestion Tool

Firstly, you can visit http://adwords.google.com, and on that page there’s a link titled “Get Keyword Ideas”. 

Click on that, and type in a keyword phrase into the box provided – and Google will make a bunch of suggestions as to other words which you could rank against.   Google will also show you some graphical information about how many people searched on these words which we’ll cover later in this eBook too.

Page 3.  Keyword Research Part II. (assessing keyword popularity, and selecting your words)