Key phrase research is important because what you think is relevant may not be anywhere near what searchers are actually typing in for their search queries. Wouldn't it be great to know what phrases people were using to find your products and services online? You can do this. It is not difficult, but takes a bit of time; time invested that will pay you back with targeted traffic to your site.

People often think that any words relating to their business are okay to use in a campaign. It is very important to use a key phrase research tool to find the best keywords to target in a campaign. If you decide to skip this research phase, you will be missing out on numerous potential key phrase opportunities, and attached to those, potential customers who want to buy what you have to sell.

Your key phrase tool (Wordtracker, Nichebot, Keyword Discovery; there are several of these you can use) helps you determine how often a phrase is searched, and how competitive the phrase is on the Internet, specifically how many pages are competing with it in Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Since Google has indexed the most pages on the Web, it is helpful to learn how much competition you will have on Google for your selected phrases.

For example, Wordtracker's database contains over 300,000,000 key phrases and you can discover how often phrases have been searched over the last 90 days. (Their database is made up of the indexes of several meta search engines. The reason for this is, that many people are out there checking the positions of their websites. All of this position checking inflates the numbers of searches on single engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. By using meta search engines, Wordtracker figures that it nullifies that, or dilutes that artificial spike in searches.)

Key phrase research tools let you save your researched phrases in a basket so you can work with those phrases in the following ways:

1) One of the most useful features available in key phrase tools is their ability to suggest synonyms or related phrases to the ones you input into the tool. Often you will find phrases suggested by the tool that you would not have considered otherwise; and the tool will tell you if they are searched highly, and what their competition is online.

2) You can export the phrases to Excel and arrange them in any number of ways.

3) The key phrase research tools allow you to email the results to anyone for them to review.

Once you have identified the key phrases that are searched well and not too competitive, remember to resist temptation - this is where the human element comes into play. Just because a phrase is well searched and not too competitive, doesn't always mean it is the right phrase to use in your page copy, titles, and meta tags. Consider the relevance of the phrase. Can you map it to a page on your site where this phrase fits naturally? Be honest with yourself and use only phrases that are very focused, and you will have the best chance to drive the target audience you are looking for, to your site.