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

If you look deeply into analytics, you would see that most of your traffic is coming from a hand full of your articles. Have you ever given it a thought that why is this so and what you did right? The reason behind this is that some of your posts get ranked for the keywords that are searched highly 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 are 1-3 words long. Example: digital marketing services, local SEO services.

· Long tail keywords are more specific keywords and consist of three or above words. Example: How to be on top on Google, How to research keyword.

Long tail keywords can generate you more traffic and revenue and your chances of getting ranked increases. The high-quality post can also get you ranked, but have you noticed that content stops getting traffic after a while?

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

You need to look for keyword density in your content. When bots crawl your site, they can figure the keyword density and rank your site for it. Stay as far away as you can from keyword stuffing as it can get you penalized. Different SEO experts have a different view for keyword density, but it shouldn’t be more than 2% of the article length. You can target multiple keywords, but it is not recommended to exceed more than three.

The importance of keyword research does not end here. There are many tips and techniques that you need to get yourself familiarize with, and you can use free tools like Semrush and Google keyword planner to plan your keywords and rank your content faster.