Keyword research is the basis and foundation of all your Search engine optimisation efforts, if you choose the wrong keywords or keyword phrases to target then you could be wasting your time and search engine optimisation efforts.

If you knew that 90% of all keywords used get next to no traffic you would start to think more seriously about how you research and target your keywords to ensure you get the best return for your investment of time and money for your website.

It is estimated that 50% of keyword searches in the search engines are made just once, now it would not be worth the time it takes to rank for this keyword phrase if you only get one visitor from it, obviously there are exceptions and we all know that every visitor is a potential customer and spending some time and money to get that customer is worth it over the life of the customer but statistically you need to attract hundreds or thousands of visitors with each of the keywords each month.

For your keyword research to be effective you need to think about what people who are looking for your goods or services would put into the search engines in order to find you. You then need to take these phrases and check how many of the people using the internet have searched for these phrases over the past month.

Remember that the number of people looking for 0800 numbers, that is the UK free phone number could be more or less than the number of people looking for the artist Jack Vettriano that does not mean that one term is better than the other if your business is related to phone numbers in the UK then 0800 numbers is more relevant to your telephone business, where as if you have an art gallery or produce art prints then Jack Vettriano artist is a much better term to promote his art work for.

So you need to consider both relevancy and visitor numbers along side the competition levels when you are completing your keyword research.