Keyword Research Article: Keyword research is hard because everyone wants to be listed number one for their main keyword. This is usually a broad term, which in all actuality will not generate the most revenue. Using our example thus far, we will use cars. At the time of writing this, the number one search result in Google for cars is cars.com. This is a great site for research, or even buying and selling. So wow, they must be the authority on cars! However, I just searched for several cars by make and model and cars.com did not come up once in the top 10.
This is the first part of SEO that confuses people. Customers do not search "cars" to buy a car. They may use cars.com as a reference, or even end up there because that site offers so many car related pages and tools, but customers will most likely type "make, model and year", or a broad search like "fuel efficient family cars" before they type "cars". These are your connecting words which were discussed in our SEO section.
If you owned a small car lot, you would not want to try to rank for the keyword "cars" for dozens of reasons. The first and most important is: You are not all about cars! You most likely will not offer up to date reviews, stories and 100s of other topics related to cars, like our market leader cars.com. You simply sell some cars. Your keywords are your products and services.
Doing your research on keywords is the single most important thing you can do. Targeting the wrong keywords will cripple you from the beginning. Know you're demographic, think like a consumer and most importantly, do not follow the industry leaders! I will elaborate on this more in the next section "SEO Myths and Legends".
Next: SEO Myths and Legends
