Regarding keywords and keyword research, there may be some explanation due before the lesson is begun in earnest. There are two different types of keywords that are most common in regards to SEO work. It is important to know which is what so that you can concentrate your efforts and optimize your results. There is both a primary keyword and what is commonly known as a “long-tailed” keyword or what is effectively a keyword phrase.

The Primary Keyword is very likely to be a very broad and vague term. For example, if you are selling puppy clothes, “Puppy” would very likely be your primary keyword. However, you do not want to concentrate all of your efforts owning the front page of the SERP or Search Engine Results Page for the word puppy. Everybody in the world who was looking for anything to do with puppies would be coming by your site but it would not help you very much at all. You would be paying more for advertising than you would ever get back in actual sales or an ROI or Return On Investment.

Since the primary keyword is exceptionally broad and vague, you will need to narrow down the field some so that you can more accurately target the people who see your advertisements and are actually searching for something relevant to what you have to offer. The long-tailed keyword or keyword phrase should narrow down the field and focus on what your specific offer is so that only those people who are looking for your products visit your site. In this case, you may use something along the lines of “cheap puppy clothes” or “custom puppy clothes” or “used puppy clothes” or whichever or even all of them that accurately reflected your offerings. In that way, you can effectively narrow down the field and get more directly targeted traffic to your website that is ready to break out their wallet and give you some cash.

Once you have selected your first options for your long-tailed keywords you will want to begin looking for one with a high KEI or Keyword Efficiency Index. That is a fancy way of saying you are looking for a keyword phrase that gets a lot of searches but does not have much competition. Now there are plenty of keyword tools available that will give you a lot of information and they should be used. However, to determine the KEI and ultimately decide whether you have selected wisely or not, the best place to go before you finish your keyword research is to the major search engines.

Perform your first search using variables of your keyword phrase. For “Used puppy clothes” you could try searching for “used puppy clothes”, “puppy clothes, used” and other relevant phrases … but without the quotes that have been used here to separate them … and this is very important. A search for used puppy clothes with no quotes will give you an idea of the number of general results that appear when the phrase is searched. Now you want to perform an additional search with your long-tailed keyword within the quotation marks. This will give you the number of people who are currently targeting or ranked for that particular keyword phrase in that exact order.

At the time of this writing, a search of used puppy clothes returned about 518,000 results. A search for Used Puppy Clothes narrowed the search results down to about 515,000 results. A search for “used puppy clothes” within quotation marks forced the search engine to look for those exact words in that exact order and narrowed the field down to four websites. Now while this may be a rather obscure niche without many searches, the results should provide an invaluable lesson for you.

By doing proper keyword research, you have discovered that you have a very specific long-tailed keyword with enough information to at least partially relevant to at least a half million websites. But you do not have to compete with over one half million websites for that particular keyword phrase. By doing your keyword research beforehand, you have now discovered a keyword that only requires you to compete with four other websites. You own them and you own the SERP. You own the SERP and you get the traffic. Now THAT is a high KEI or Keyword Efficiency Index. Now, all you have to do is to learn how to promote those keyword phrases and associate them with your website. Keyword research took care of all of the hard work for you before you ever began.