Keyword Research - Part 2.

OK, here goes. Before I get into the answers to the above questions, lets tackle the basics.

Aren't Keyword Research and Search Engine Optimization the same? How does Search Engine Optimization(SEO) relate to keywords?
SEO is the process of increasing the number of visitors to your web-page by the careful and deliberate use of targeted keywords and their specific placements designed to get the page show up on the top listing for such keywords. (SEO also includes other strategies such as using inbound and outbound links, link sharing with other sites, etc. But all that is beyond the purpose of this article.)

Now, lets divvy this up and see what it really means.

1) Its the process of increasing the number of visitors to your web-page. The question is :What kind of visitors? We need only visitors who are actually looking to buy something that we are selling. So, I need visitors who have typed into the search engine the exact sequence of targeted keywords you have mentioned on your page.

2) Careful and deliberate use of targeted keywords: Search Engines determine your ranking by a number of factors. Keywords in all the important places are very important for a search engine to find your page and also determine its meaning as well as its position in the list displayed to the customer.

A search engine uses a spider(a piece of software code) executing against your page. It goes through the text in your page and tries to determine what the page is about. It also tries to determine the relevance of your material in terms of what the user has typed into the search engine.

About every month, the spider crawls through the world wide web and updates the search engine Index. When the user types in a phrase in the search engine text box, the search engine looks in its database for  web pages matching those words and display the results.

Why should I take the time to do keyword research?