Building your site's foundation with keyword research

Your keyword strategy is the foundation of everything you'll do in search optimization. Your page titles, navigation menus, content, even your domain name itself will all be dictated by your keyword strategy. Just like a building's foundation, if your keyword strategy is flawed, the house that sits upon the foundation will be flawed.

In the world of Internet search, the term keyword can refer to single words, or word phrases. Word phrases are also sometimes called keyphrases, keyword strings, or keyword phrases. In this book, we'll use all these terms interchangeably—regardless of how many individual words comprise a keyword. When implementing your keyword strategy, the family of keywords you incorporate into your strategy will likely be a mix of single terms and multi-word terms. Keep in mind that single word keyphrases are nearly always more competitive than multiple-word keyphrases—that's because single word searches are generally searched for in higher volumes than longer strings.

But will ranking for single word terms bring instant success? Not necessarily, single word phrases have relevancy problems for nearly all websites. For example, the term coffee is searched nearly 19,000 times daily throughout the world on Google alone. But is a web user in London searching for coffee necessarily a perfect customer for a coffee shop in Los Angeles? Of course not! Keywords must be relevant in order to be useful to you. Search volume alone is not enough. You need to find the right blend of high-search volume and relevance to your product or service.