What is Keyword research?

What words are typed into that search box every day? Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website. It is important to remember that it’s not always about getting loads of visitors to your website it’s about getting the right kind of visitors. To do this you need to research your markets keyword demand, this will help you learn more about your customers and help you know which terms and keywords to target when conducting SEO. It's also important that you conduct keyword research as you can then see shifts in demands, act on changing market conditions and produce products and content that web searchers are actively seeking. 

The value of keywords

How valuable are keywords to your website? It’s hard to say how valuable a keyword is to your website. A way to find out would be to do some tests and repeat these tests. By doing this this will help you understand your website and the value of the keywords that you have. There is a basic process for assessing a keywords value.

• Ask yourself is the keyword relevant to your website and if searchers search this keyword will they find what they are looking for when they get to your site. Will they be happy? Will it bring your company financial rewards.
• Search for the keyword in major search engines so you can see what your competition is and how hard it will be to rank for this keyword.

Long Tail of keyword demand

The long tail search contains millions of unique searches that compromise the majority of the world’s search volume, around 70% of searches fall into the long tail search. The popular search terms make up the other 30% of searches performed on the web, people don't search for these popular words as much. By searching more unique keywords the user will get more accurate results for what they are actually looking for, if they just search the word shoes a load of pages come up. If they use a unique word like periwinkle in front of the word shoes the result are more accurate and they don't have to search through multiple sites to find what they are looking for.

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/11/07/how-to-find-long-tail-keywords

Keyword research

Google’s Adwords is a great tool to find out the most searched word in a certain area that you are looking at, it can take you years of effort to get up the rankings as it’s an uphill battle. By using Google Adwords it can make this job easier as you know which keywords to include in your Meta tag and your title tag. 

Keyword difficulty

What are your chances of success? You need to understand the demand for a given term or phrase, this will then help you understand which keywords to target.It will also indicate to you how much work you need to do to achieve higher rankings.