Keyword research is a vital part of any online marketing campaign. As web site owner, you may be very surprised to find out, that is some cases, the most searched for keyword sets associated with your industry are less obvious ones. For example, there are many sites that market pages for tickets to the popular Broadway play Mamma Mia. However, the keyword set, 'mama mia tickets' is searched for 30 percent more than the correctly spelled, 'mamma mia tickets.'

That is only one small example showing why it is important to quantify the keyword research. The keyword research will, in most cases, determine a web site's marketing path. For example, the keyword research might show that a significant amount of people are searching for the manufacturers of the products a web site sells to warrant creating content rich pages to specifically market those words (more Focused content page creation information).

On the other hand, the keyword research might show, to a web site owner's surprise, that not a significant amount of people are searching for the part numbers of the products or some other specific qualifier of their services otherwise deemed very popular. In this case, it would be more effective to add those words to the group of keywords being bid on for placement in different search engines (more Pay-Per-Click information).

The keyword research is derived from actual searches within the last sixty days on the Meta-Search Engine Dogpile. Results are taken from Dogpile.com because many other search engines get bogus searches each month from businesses checking their placement within the search engine's results. Because Dogpile.com is a Meta-Search Engine, an engine that displays results from a variety of search engines, it does not have a database of web sites and therefore their search statistics are much more accurate.

Once a robust set of keywords has been determined, it is also important to check out a web site's competitors. For each keyword set that has a significant amount of searches, one to two competitor web sites will be visited. The structure, Meta Tags and content will be analyzed. This tactic gives an immediate impression of how many people are competing for those keywords and the Google Page Rank that must be attained to rank in the top five.