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The single most important thing you can do to try to get your website top search engine rankings is to optimize your choice of keywords. Your choice of keywords should guide every decision you make about building your website, putting content on your website, and marketing your website on the internet. Marketing on the internet is in some ways similar to offline marketing, but in other ways it is quite unique due to it being primarily a search oriented media. In brief, the amount of exposure you get for your website is more dependent upon keyword research and optimizing your list of keywords than anything else you do.

When you're developing an online business, you need to devote a lot of time and energy to keyword research. It's well worth taking a hands-on approach to keyword research, regardless of whether you would normally do everything yourself or outsource much of your online marketing to different businesses. Your online business will succeed or fail based on whether you can match your target customers to as wide a range of search terms as possible. It's not always obvious, either, which keyword terms will be most likely to attract potential customers to your website. It's also difficult to determine how much competition there is likely to be for particular words or phrases unless you carry out research. Your website is unlikely to succeed unless you've done your homework on keywords.

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 developed an initial list of keywords, you will need to expand the list. At this stage, you will take the initial list of one or two word phrases and flesh them out into two to five word phrases that will be the core of your keyword optimization project. Determine what kind of competition you have for each of the keyword phrases you want to use. In general, it is better for a young company to target phrases that are relevant to your business, but that are less competitive than the most popular ones. If you have sufficient capital, you should consider investing in software, online paid keyword research tools, or hiring a specialist to help you with this step in the process. For many busy business owners, hiring someone to do it for them is often the best step, since it saves having to spend many hours becoming an expert on the nitty-gritty details of internet marketing. However, only you can decide how best to spend your time.

Now that you've compiled a list of keywords, what next? Keywords are useful for every aspect of marketing on the web. Your goal is to create pages that are extremely relevant to your list of keywords, so you can use your list of primary keywords as a sort of blueprint to build your webpages. Also, hyperlinks within your site should reflect keywords important to your site. After using them to plan out the structure of your site, you can next apply the keywords elsewhere in order to route traffic to your website. Google Adwords is one paid search advertising site that will allow your list to direct your marketing strategy and control your budget. If you are aiming at a higher ranking for search engines, your list will prioritize and direct your project. The exact method by which you advertise doesn't ultimately matter, but wisely choosing and using your keywords does.