Are you getting enough traffic to your website? The best way to increase traffic to your site is by ensuring you appear near the top of the results page on the largest search engines; Google and Bing/Yahoo. The major search engines have crawlers through which they scan the content on a website and establish a ranking.

If the content have specific keywords that match the particular query, the search engines rank your website in its search engine result page. With modern attitude being founded on speed and convenience, the higher a website is ranked on a results page, the more likely it is to attract visitors and potential customers and entice them to click on the page listed.

A detailed keyword research is an invaluable tool for an effective online marketing campaign, and for creating informative content on your website. A site
that can easily be found by Google & Bing will have more visits, which usually translates into more sales (with a properly constructed and simple buying or lead-capture process).

Creating an effective SEO campaign in 2012 heavily relies on keyword research. Think about particular words and phrases that a potential customer will be searching. There is no use in optimizing your site for keywords that nobody is searching for. Keyword research often starts by brainstorming a list of keywords to investigate and expand upon, sometimes referred to as a Keyword Seed List.

Here are the steps required for a thorough keyword seed list, using the fictional “Misty’s Home Made Muffins” as an example:

Think of every phrase that can be associated with your product or service. Don’t just limit these to the phrases you come up with; ask your family, friends, and co-workers what comes to mind when they think of your business. For Misty’s Muffins, this may be:
baking, muffins, muffin bakery, bakeries, muffin recipes, breakfast catering, toronto muffins, healthy muffins

Check out your competition’s website. What keywords do they seem to be using throughout their site? Looking at few different muffin websites, we might see a lot of:
baker’s choice, baked fresh muffins, pastry products, pastries, muffin recipes

Use a thesaurus. You may think you are covering every relevant key word, but perhaps people are using different words for their search.
danish, bread, cruller, doughnut, eclair, muffin , pastry, scone, sweet roll

Offline advertising. Check out industry-related print ads and other forms of offline advertising. See what words tend to come up in these ads, and the various approaches that are taken.

Use unique geographical areas. Google has localized search, so this isn’t as much of a concern anymore, but is still a good way to be safe when generating a keyword seed list.