So you’ve built a humdinger of a website. How do you make sure that when people are searching for the products or services you offer, your site comes up on the first page of a search engine such as Google? It’s almost a scientific process, actually. And it’s called SEO – or Search Engine Optimization.

First, you need to know what people are searching for online. How do you do that? Well you might ask your customers. You could guess at it. Or you could do keyword research.

If you can predict what people will search on — and know in what volume such a phrase is searched — and how few competitors are trying to rank for that term – then you have a tasty piece of low-hanging fruit within arm’s reach.

To do solid keyword research you can 1) check your old site’s statistics on visitor’s entry phrases and 2) put your website’s URL into the Google Adwords tool (free) for their suggestions and 3) subscribe to a proprietary keyword research tool like Wordtracker that gives detailed information on search volumes and active competition.

You’ll be surprised by what is keeping people up at night! Keyword Research is like mind-reading and is