The keywords and phrases you select to describe your site within your META tags and body text can make or break your listings in the search engines. By targeting the wrong keywords, most companies are losing traffic.

Even sites that have excellent rankings will not benefit if those rankings are for unsuitable keywords.

While selecting keywords you aim at increasing the traffic to your website through the search engines and the choice of right keywords ensures that your visitors are highly qualified to buy your products and services when they arrive. So while selecting the keywords and phrases for your site, remember to select search terms that describe your products and services in the most logical, simple and specific way.

There are two categories of keyword research:

1) You already know what content you want to create and are seeking the best keyword to optimize the page.
2) You have an idea about the general area of the content, but are researching keywords to figure out the specific topic that you should be developing content for.

Why are Keywords Important?

A significant component of a search engine's ranking algorithm comes from their analysis of the keywords in the text of the page. This includes the density of the keyword in the text as well as the placement of the keyword.
Well, some keyword research will be able to reveal a lot of information to you. For instance, there might be many keywords around which you might create the article: Your article can retain its exact topic, but still focus on one of several set of keywords obtained through keyword search tools.

So, Which Keywords do I Select? The Most Popular one?

There is a significant element of 'judgment call' here. And you would expect there to be, right? After all good SEO is art as well as science. Sometimes, two keywords could be equally popular, but one might be far more competitive than the other. At other points of time, you might deliberately select a keyword of lesser popularity as it might yield better traffic than other keywords.