Keyword research is often overlooked by many new SEOs as being too basic, a waste of time. They do not understand why anyone would need a list of 10,000 words. What could anyone ever do with that? This is where many new SEOs are confused because as any experienced SEO knows – keyword research is so much more than just a list of words. Generating the keyword universe is only the first step. From there you must do a couple more things – finding the competition and search volume for each of these words.

The end goal of all of this time spent doing research is to be able to target the keywords/phrases that have high search volume and low competition. To old SEOs the importance of this seems obvious – lower the competition the more easy it is to rank highly – the higher you rank the more traffic you will get.

I suppose it’s the seemingly tedious nature of the keyword research that turns off people who are just learning about SEO. It sounds overwhelming to those who are not comfortable with or do not know about the right tools.

There are plenty of great tools out there for making keyword research easy, if not enjoyable. I’ve blogged before about some of these tools, but I’ll specifically mention a couple of them again – KeywordDiscovery.com and WordTracker.com. Neither are very expensive and they are very helpful at generating some great keyword lists. When it comes to which is better it really comes down to a matter of opinion as they both work very well, are simple to use, and both do similar things. If you have the budget, use both and compare the data between them.