Keyword Research for Effective Search Engine Optimization
Not all search engine optimization implementations are equal. Some are more equal than others. For example, if you SEO your website for a number of keywords that are not very popular with users, you might be on the 1st page on Google for those keywords, maybe even become the number one link, but your website traffic will be low. What would be the point in all this SEO?
Show Me the Money
Search Engine Optimization should always be performed having the ultimate goal in mind - revenue in $$$. You don't need SEO your website for keywords your customers would not use or use very seldom. You need to SEO your website for leywords that would be popular among the majority of your customer base.
Keyword Popularity: SEO Keyword Research Tools
It is not difficult to find which keywords are more popular and which ones are less popular. Use any one of the following SEO keyword research tools, but I personally recommend Wordtracker:
Here is an example of the Wordtracker's paid tool report for "search engine optimization", "web design", and "website design". Note the "count" values, those values represent the number of times someone actually queried those keywords in search engines in the past few months. The higher the count value the more profitable the keyword.
Keyword Competitiveness: Search Engine Result Pages or SERPs
Once you've determined 10-15 most popular keywords in your field, you need to check how competitive those keywords are. Query those keywords one by one on Google and note the number of search results returned in response to each query. Those are Search Engine Result Pages or SERPs, they indicate - roughly - how much competition your keywords have.
Ideally, you'd want to focus on those keywords that have the highest popularity value while generating the lowest SERP value.
