Keyword Research Do Your Due Diligence

Before building you website for your home business, you have to know not only who your target market is, but also what they are searching for. Sounds pretty easy right.

Without doing this research it is almost impossible to optimize your site for both organic traffic and (PPC) pay-per-click. Having a strong grasp of your subject matter is important.

When you have this in-depth knowledge, you're almost assured of writing strong web copy that contains the essential keywords required.

I've read where a few people will tell you to look at your competitors metadata to determine what keywords to optimize for...

...You can do that if you like, but it takes far more research to figure out exactly what keywords the site - page are optimized for.

Knowledgeable marketers know better than to give all of that away in the meta-data, especially since the search-engines ignore it anyway.

It again comes back to knowing your subject matter, if you try to fake it the writing style and keywords just will not be there.

What Is Important.

Know where you customers are searching and what terms and phrases they are using to conduct these searches.

You could almost call this knowing where the fish are! Sounds kind of funny but if you know where they are it is much easier (to catch them in the case of fish) or complete some kind of conversion on your website.

How You Can Locate Where They Are Searching.

Today we have software from various individuals (pretty pricy) that will help you accomplish this keyword research. But, we still don't know where the majority of searches are being conducted for our particular topic.

In fact you could be optimizing your website for the wrong keywords. At least as far as where the majority of searches are being conducted.

To identify where the searches are being conducted there are a couple of options. There is a subscription service called WordTracker, I've used this before and it's good.

Then there is a website called spacky.com which gives me just enough of what I'm really looking for. It provides the number of searches being conducted on Google, Yahoo, and Live - Bing.com

Not only does it give me the number of searches being conducted on a particular keyword, it also gives me a list of related terms and the searches being conducted on them as well.

From this extended, related list, you'll now have ideas to create additional pages on your home business website that are related to the theme of your site.