It practically goes without saying that part of a good Internet Marketing management strategy is to make it easy for the people who need or want what you have to find you.
That said, most people include some keywords they consider pertinent in their website's headings, content, metadata, and so on.
That's great as far as it goes.
Brainstorming a list of potential keywords is important.
But for your efforts to be effective, choosing keywords that are pertinent is only the beginning.
Why? In a word, competition.
As a foundation, it helps to know the percentage of click-throughs that the top ten results of search engine listings can expect to receive.
Not surprisingly, the very first listing gets the lion's share of click-throughs at 42.
4 percent.
The second listing can expect 11.
8 percent.
This drops sharply until the tenth listing gets only 2.
9 percent of click-throughs.
So what you have is a crowd of websites competing for a limited pool of traffic and obviously, it pays to rank high.
That's where keyword research comes into play, because it gives you the data you need to pick your battles wisely, choosing keyword phrases that a large number of people are searching for but that a relatively small number of other businesses are optimizing for.
To illustrate, let's say you've written an absolutely fabulous e-book with blueprints and instructions for building a backyard chicken coop that even a construction novice can follow with ease.
You want to reach out to new backyard poultry enthusiasts who want to build their own coop.
Keyword research will reveal the following:

• Backyard chicken coop generates 6,600 global monthly searches.
  There is high competition for this phrase within Google AdWords.
  90,900 webpages globally include this exact keyword phrase and the top ten results are fairly well-optimized for it from an SEO standpoint.
  
• Backyard chicken coops (plural) has only 2,400 global monthly searches and there is very high competition for it in Google AdWords.
  49,700 webpages include this phrase, globally, and the top ten results in Google are fairly well-optimized.
  
• Chicken coop plans boasts 49,500 global monthly searches, but there is only medium competition for this keyword phrase in Google AdWords.
  Numbered at 258,000, there are a lot of webpages globally that include the phrase.
  However, if you do some research on the competition, you'll find that none of the top ten results are strongly optimized for it, so if you put into play a smart and comprehensive SEO strategy, there's good reason to believe that you'll be able to rank very high.
  And the potential rewards are impressive.
  The number-one-rated website could expect to receive close to 700 click-throughs daily!

So which keyword phrase do you think fits in best with the Internet Marketing management goal of generating the greatest amount of targeted traffic without going up against competition that's overly strong? As you can see, the data generated by keyword research can help you, the business owner, to make your best strategic decision on which keywords to optimize for before you go to the time, trouble, and possibly expense of creating content.
Copyright 2010