A keyword word is like a key to a lock. A keyword or a phrase in context of website development is the word or phrase that a searcher is likely to use in order to find the product, service or information that your website intends to promote.

The question, however, arises, why the choice of right keywords or phrases is important for the success of your website.

The answer is that there are millions of websites on the Internet that are trying to sell the product or service that your website is promoting or selling. In other words, these websites are your competitors.

For example, you want to promote a weight loss herbal product through your website. Just type the words “weight loss” in the Google search engine page and you will be bamboozled into finding hundreds of thousands of sites devoted to weight loss products.

Your site may just be one of these countless competitors. How is a customer going to land upon your site? It is no use opening a shop if it cannot attract any customer.

This is where the role of keyword research comes in.

If you want to sell a product which millions of others too are selling, you are in for a very tough competition. Even if you spend thousands of dollars on advertisement of your product or service, the chances of your success still remain remote. The solution to this problem is to offer a product or service for a certain specific segment of audience in the general category or broad market of your service or product.

The solution lies in finding a specific segment also called niche in the broad market.

The first step in this direction is to find out a keyword research tool or service. There are several keyword research tools. The most popular keyword research tools are WordTracker and Google research tool. While WordTracker offers limited free service, Google’s tool is almost free.

If you use the paid services of WordTracker key word research tool, you can find hundreds of popular keywords and phrases that the searchers usually use. You can also determine their activity or popularity among competitors. Their top 1,000 report provides the most frequently searched for terms. They also have a competition search option that provides invaluable information to know the competitiveness of each keyword/phrase. This can give you an idea of how easy or difficult it would be to rank your site in the search engine for a given keyword/phrase.

WordTracker’s free service can also be useful though they provide only up to 100 keywords/phrases and the number of searches in the previous month.

Besides WordTracker, you can use Google AdWords keyword research tool. This tool is both comprehensive and free. This is Google’s PPC (pay-per-click) tool. It provides a list of similar and competitive keywords or phrases, but it does not give the exact number of searches for each keyword. It only displays a colored bar that gives an approximate idea of its search volume each month.

Google Suggest, is yet another tool that instantly provides a list of synonyms and related word suggestions that may help the users to further expand their original keyword list. Thesaurus.Com is also a great tool to locate synonyms.

Once you have made a comprehensive list of possible keywords and their search volume, it is time to narrow down the list by structuring the keywords in a certain layered pattern or sub-categories.

It must be noted that your main keyword in the present context is weight loss. We can call this as the first layer keyword.

Our next step should be to find ten most popular sub-categories in weight loss. There are several types of health situations where overweight or obesity causes acute problems. The problem may exist in new born babies, teenage children, pregnant women, diabetic persons, asthmatics, heart patients and so on.

Each of this group will have a common keyword that represents it. This grouping may consist of second layer keywords. If you like, you may use these keywords as navigation buttons in your website. If you are building up blogs, you may also use these keywords as the titles on which to expand your blog.

You may further narrow down your list. For example, an obese patient of asthma may find himself in breathing trouble at an unearthly hour past midnight. How can he meet such emergent situations at his own level or find medical help which usually is not available at this hour?

This is called niche marketing. You do not target a broad market in weight loss problems. You target a very specific area, a niche in that market.

After you have determined the niche keywords, you may write appropriate content for the main page and the subsequent pages of your website.