It feels really nice looking at websites or blogs that rank for competitive keywords. But do you know how much effort goes into making a site rank at the top in search engines? There's plenty of work that goes on 'behind the scenes'. Most of the small businesses don't have the budget to hire a professional SEO service or agency. No wonder, you can conduct the keyword research yourself by following a couple of useful guidelines and tips.

Herer's a 5-point formula to help you with your keyword research:

#1. Familiarize Yourself with Multiple Keyword Tools
There are a wide variety of keyword tools that you can use to conduct research for your site, both free and paid. What's important is that you know how to use each of those tools effectively. By getting familiar with the usage of multiple tools, you'll be able to come up with different ideas.

Here are some free keyword tools that Google offers:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool (helps you find related keywords or phrases)
Google Trends (helps you compare various search terms)
Google Product Search (useful for product-related research)
Google Correlate (helps you find keywords with matching popularity)
Google Insights for Search (helps you compare keywords based on industry, location, time range etc)

Paid tools include Wordtracker, Keyword Spy, Keyword Winner etc. There are so many options that you can utilize to find potential keywords, that increase conversions and make you more money. However, you should first know how to use these tools for maximum benefits.

#2. Understand Your Position
Are you in the right position to launch a powerful attack? While doing the keyword research (and hoping to get results), you must also be quite clear about where you currently stand. Consider the age of your domain, pagerank, quality of links pointing back to your domain etc. In short, you need to make sure whether or not you're a good competitor yourself in the first place. It's vital to plan your SEO keyword strategy in the light of all these points.

#3. Prepare a List of Initial Keywords You'd Like to Target
If you run a small business or manufacture products, you need to get into your customers' shoes quickly. Do some brainstorming to find out what your customers will type into the search box while looking for a product or service you offer. Use the different keyword tools (that you're familiar with) to get some creative ideas. The keyword list that you get is only a preliminary one.

#4. Analyze Keyword Competition
How much time does it take to rank for a specific keyword or phrase? This is the most important point that you need to understand, if you're really serious about achieving success with your keyword research. If you're trying to top-rank for a keyword where you have top 10 competitors like Wikipedia, About.com and WordPress.org, you need to think again. It's by analyzing the competition that you understand what keywords you should actually aim at.

#5. Select the Final Keywords
Now that you understand the competition that you'll face for each of the top level keywords that you want to rank for, it's easier to narrow down that preliminary list of keywords. If you want to generate more leads and increase the revenue, you should focus on high converting search terms.

While finalizing the keyword list, you should:

Select keywords with different search volumes (high, mid and low)
Focus on relevancy rather than chasing only search volume
Have realistic expectations, particularly if you've a new site
Target long-tail keywords for increased conversions
Remember the keywords that your site is already ranking for

As a matter of fact, no keyword list is a final list. Keyword trends continue to change. You should keep a close watch on how certain keywords are performing. After running the SEO campaign for a couple of months, you need to evaluate the keyword statistics again so that you can make necessary alterations. However, whatever you do, do it with some patience. Don't rush!

It is important to understand the differences in what is best suited when using keywords to determine the match competition.

Here I have included the following 3:

1. Broad match keywords

Search engines search for the keyword(s) you’re using and also similar phrases and relevant variations. Broad match will include misspellings, plurals and synonyms.

Pros: You can drive significantly more traffic to your ads. You spend less time coming up with long-tail keywords.

Cons: Your traffic is less targeted and less likely to convert. Your keyword may not be strongly correlated to your ad or landing page, and that can hurt your Google Quality Score.

2. “Phrase match” keywords

Search engines only trigger ads when keywords in your phrase are matched. To create phrase match keywords, surround your keyword phrases in quotes.

Pros: Phrase match is more targeted than broad match, and more flexible than exact match.

Cons: It won’t drive the traffic that broad match does, but won’t be as targeted as exact. It’s a nice in-between way to use keywords.

3. [Exact match] keywords

Search engines only trigger ads when the exact phrase is matched. To create exact match keywords, surround your keyword phrases in brackets.

Pros: Extremely targeted traffic that is more likely to convert.

Cons: Will drive less traffic. To compensate, you’ll need a very comprehensive list of keywords.

By researching keywords with low competition you can achieve first page ranking with very little optimization effort

It is known that if you target keywords that have 100,000 competing pages or lower you can rank to the 1st page in literally hours and this can be achieved with the help of very few backlinks if any at all.

Blogging is a good example, because each time you write a headline for a blog post the most important aspect of it is the headline which contains the keywords you want to rank for along with the meta title and the permalink. The content on the site itself is really secondary and is what I like to call the icing on the cake.

See the problem is Internet marketers get too caught up in chasing keywords that have high searches and yes of course to get top ranking for highly searched keywords you need loads of backlinks and maintaining position is even more of a challenge, so the link building aspect becomes not only difficult but time consuming and costly.

Link building is becoming less important as time moves on and even though it is considered to be Google’s main quality score when it comes to weighing up the authority of a site, Keyword competition is still the bread winner because if you research your keywords properly you can rank well without any backlinks at all. I have developed niche sites and seen pages rise to the top very quickly as a result of simply just choosing the right keywords.

This is why I like to use a SEO plugin called Keyword Winner as you can literally find keywords that are non competitive but yet have a promising search trend. One example is taking advantage of products that recently launched and have huge buzz but do not have any search competition at all, because they are being promoted in other forms of marketing such as email marketing, social marketing or viraly. But you can jump on them quickly write a review post about it and rank 1st page in a few hours. I have done numerous case studies on this and it is proven.

Keyword Winner basically gives you up to 10 keyword suggestions as you write a headline for your blog post in your dashboard and color codes the most competitive keywords against least competitive ones. It uses Google Insights to see the percentage of overall searches conducted for the month and Google Trends to see if the keywords are trending over a period of time. The problem is it’s a pain going back and forth to Google Insights, Google Competition and Google Trends for every blog post you do so the tool saves loads of time and headache.

So where does this leave us?

Will backlinks become less important as us internet marketers, bloggers and SEO professionals become smarter in finding ways to place ourselves in between competition in a very discrete manner? Just one keyword can make all the difference and can be a million times easier or harder to rank, so the point of this post is that if you get that winning keyword you will have less reason to need loads of links to enhance the chance of being ranked higher.

Make a new years resolution, for 2011 focus on keywords and put less effort into backlinks!