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The most important step you can take to maximize your search engine ratings is to optimize your keywords. Every step of your internet business, from decisions about the design of your website, to the choice of content and marketing efforts for your website should be guided by the need to optimize your keywords. This is because Internet marketing, while sharing some characteristics with offline marketing, is primarily a search oriented media. You will get more exposure for your website through keyword research and optimization than you will from any other measure you may take.

To succeed in your internet business, you must closely involve yourself in keyword research. Even if you have outsourced the marketing of your web business, you must personally work on keyword research. People use a lot of keywords to search on the internet and matching as many search terms as possible to lead to your website is a very important task, directly related to the success of your business. This is because without adequate research, you are less likely to know what keyword phrases your potential customers might use to search the internet for businesses like yours and secondly, you will get a better idea about the competition for a keyword phrase if you do research. Without this effort from your side, you may not achieve much success with your web business.

Before you begin your keyword research, you must be very clear about your target market and the product or service you plan to offer. Without this clarity, you might be able to get a lot of hits but very few would convert to sales, thereby causing an unnecessary drain on your time and money. Once you achieve clarity on this, you can do some brainstorming to come up with a list of keywords you think are relevant. Google's keyword tool helps to get you started. It is a free and useful tool available for this purpose.

After you have compiled your first list of keywords, it is time to add to that list. To do this, expand each of the one- or two-word phrases that you have developed into a variety of phrases that are two to five words long. These longer phrases should be the first targets of your keyword optimization project. You need to determine how much competition you want to have for your keyword phrases of interest. In general, you're better off using many less competitive phrases instead of one or two highly competitive phrases. You may find it worthwhile to purchase software that will help you with this process, or to use an online paid keyword research system. You may even decide to pay someone else to do all of the required work, and this option is especially attractive if you are a business owner who does not feel the need to become an internet marketing expert first and foremost. You have to determine what the best use of your time is.

So you have all these keywords now, so what do you do with them? The keywords are used for all aspects of your internet marketing. You initially use them to plan the content and structure of your site. You want to have pages on your site who's content is targeted at your primary list of keywords. You want to use links in your site that reflect the keyword terms of interest to you. After you have planned your site around the keywords it is now time to use them outside your site to drive traffic to your site. If you are using paid search advertising, such as Google Adwords, this list will guide your advertising strategy and budget. If you are going for top listings in the natural search results, the list will guide all your efforts to improve your rankings in the search engines. No matter how you intend to promote your site, you must make keyword research your first priority.