Traffic from search engines is vital for a website. Keyword research is a fundamental process and vital for the success of any company website or blog. It is at the heart of all website marketing or search engine optimisation campaigns. Although keyword research may be seen as more of a marketing task, a professional web design company will often optimise a website and its Meta tags from the start.
Most company websites look professional and have been created by professional web designers. The long term success of a company website however depends largely on how easy it is for prospective customers to find the website.

Companies spend considerable time or resources to market and promote the company’s website. Not selecting the right keywords from the start can lead to considerable loss of effort and resources. Although it is perfectly reasonable to amend keywords if the strategy demands, it can nevertheless lead to loss of time and result in missed opportunities for the company. It is best to identify the right keywords from the start when the website is designed and launched.

Ideally keywords research should be conducted even before a company commission the design of its website or at least started in the initial stages of web design. A business can thus provide the keywords to the web design team in order to ensure basic optimisation factors are addressed from the start. A professional web design company will optimise a website for search engines on launch. Appropriate keywords should be represented within the site content, Meta tags and in the internal links on the website. As such, ideally keyword research for a website should be done prior to the completion of web design and subsequent launch of the website.

One of the main purposes for designing a website is to promote the company or its products and services. An effective keyword strategy is thus often more important than the design of the site itself.

An effective keyword research strategy involves the following steps:

• Identify initial keywords
• Research keywords using external sources and tools
• Refine initial Keywords based on results from keyword tools
• Identify additional keywords including long-tail phrases
• Don’t forget to target the less competitive keyword phrases
• Identify and research new topics for your content (pages that you can add to your main company website, articles, blog posts and press releases)
• Use keyword research data on an ongoing basis
• Write website content targeting selected keywords