Keyword research is the backbone of ranking a website. Choosing the right keyword and optimizing it will give you more traffic and will rank your website faster in the search engine. The keyword is the first thing you need to know when moving towards optimizing your site or blog. This article is for beginners to better understand what is the importance of keyword research in website ranking and getting traffic.

If you take a deeper look at the analytics, you’ll see that most of your traffic is coming from a handful of your articles. Have you ever thought about why it is like this and what did you do right? The reason behind this is that some of your posts are ranked for the keywords that are highly searched in a particular region. Before jumping into its importance, you need to understand the difference between long tail and short tail keyword.

· Short tail keywords have 1 to 3 words. Example: digital marketing services, local SEO services.

Long-tail keywords are more specific keywords and consist of three or more words. Example: How to be at the top of Google, How to search for keywords.

Long-tail keywords can bring you more traffic and revenue and your chances of ranking boosts. High-quality posting can also rank for you, but have you noticed that content stops getting traffic after a while?

When you optimize your website, you have to define keywords called Meta_keywords, but as of 2016 there is no use as search engines are smart enough to automatically detect keywords and automatically rank your pages. Ranking for the wrong keyword would affect your bounce rate and decrease the average time a user spends on the website.

You should look for the keyword density in your content. When bots crawl your site, they can calculate keyword density and rank your site for it. Stay as far away from keyword stuffing as possible, as it can penalize you. Different SEO experts have different views on keyword density, but it should not be more than 2% of the article length. You can target multiple keywords, but exceeding more than three is not recommended.

The importance of keyword research does not end here. There are plenty of tips and techniques to familiarize yourself with, and you can use free tools like Semrush and Google Keyword Planner to plan your keywords and rank for your content faster.