Keyword research should be the number one step taken when it comes to optimizing your website successfully so that it ranks favourably in the search results for relevant and popular keywords.
Keyword research involves understanding what keywords online shoppers use when searching for information, products or services on search engines. It involves analysis of the actual keywords or phrases that online user’s type when looking for solutions to address their problems or products they wish to purchase.
Keyword Tools Used
There are various keyword software tools used to help analyze keyword trends and their usage. Two very popular keyword analysis tools include Google’s Adword Keyword Tool which is free and 
also Word Tracker which is a paid service but is very effective. What these tools help you do is to easily find out how many times specific keyword has been searched on the internet in a given period of time, however it is worth noting that these tools will only give an estimate of searches made and not specific figures.
Understanding keyword usage is very important to help a website owner to best target traffic coming through the search engines and if you incorporate right the keywords that people are searching, then you can be confident you will get quality traffic from people looking for your products or services.
Keyword Types
There are two types of keywords when looking at keyword analysis and they are ‘main keywords’ and ‘long tail keywords’.
Main keywords are specific words that are highly competitive and normally are specific to a product or service. Ranking high on a main keyword term is very important and this is achieved by quality SEO such as link building. So if you owned a football shirt retail website for example then a main keyword would be something like ‘football shirts’, ‘football kits’, ‘Arsenal football shirt’ etc and by getting your website to rank on Page 1 of Google for these terms would generate a good amount of quality traffic.
Long tails keywords are normally small phrases and are used when people are looking for something very specific. So if we used the football shirt retail website as an example again, someone might search for the long tail phrase ‘cheap arsenal boys football shirt’. As you can see this is very specific and so ranking for these terms will not get you high volumes of traffic but they will get you quality traffic that are more likely to purchase which is why the long tail is an important part of SEO.
Conclusion
Once you understand what keywords users are searching for, then you can tailor your on page SEO accordingly by including the relevant phrases into the meta data, title tags and page description. Remember that keyword research is vital to succeeding online and to not engage in keyword research you seriously run the risk of ranking for poor keywords which will generate next to no traffic.
Author Info : Jonathan is working with leading football shirt retailer Soccerbox who specialises in the selling of great ranges of football kits, football shirts and football merchandise.
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Hello I am Rahul and I am co-owner of 
