The world of search engine optimization can be overwhelming. There are always changes being made to the recommended strategies you should be following. Advancements are made, new strategies are found to work well, old strategies start to be viewed as illicit or “black hat” and so on. However, one component of SEO never changes, and that’s the fact that all of your success begins with research when it comes to improving your site’s ranking in the displayed results of search engines.

The bottom line, simplistic view on the matter is that if you don’t know the words and phrases you have to optimize for, then how can you go about applying SEO to your site? SEO factors into all of the choices you make for your site – the niche that you decide you want to go after, the domain name you choose, the content you develop and on down the list. Therefore the start to the entire process is research, and its importance cannot be stressed highly enough.

There are many tools and programs that you have at your disposal to help with the research process. Of course many of these are paid tools or subscription services. However, there are also plenty of free tools that you can use and see just as much success. For example, the Google Adwords tool allows you to get detailed information on the popularity of various phrases.

To begin your research with this free tool, just enter in a broad term or phrase, and you’ll get a listing of results for similar and related terms. You’ll see how many people search for that phrase every month, what kinds of trends there are over the course of the year and how competitive the phrase is for Adwords campaigns. In just a few minutes you’ll have a very clear picture of how competitive and how popular a particular niche or market is. You can then pick out specific phrases you want to target and move on from there.

Besides knowing how many people search for a particular phrase, you also want to know how competitive it is. Of course a generic word like “football” is going to get millions of searches every month, but good luck trying to rank for something like that. After you find the popularity of keywords, you then want to check out the competition for those words. Take your researched words and search for them in Google to see how many results come up, as well as which sites show up on the first few pages. You’ll build up an idea of what the competition is like and how easy it will be to surpass or outdo them.

SEO will never work for your site if you don’t know what you should be optimizing with. Research is where it all begins, and if you take the time to research your keyword selection effectively then you will see far improved results. Keep in mind the popularity of the keyword as well as the competitiveness of the phrase in the market, and you’ll be able to get your site ranked far more easily.