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Doing keyword research is more important than a lot of people realize. Before writing this article, I googled the phrase: "doing keyword research" in quotes, just like that, and found that there were 83,000 results.

Usually it would be better to pick a title that had less exact match results, but because I am in Australia, I can compete quite well for popular titles, because Google favors local content, and most of the results come from the other side of the world.

It is when you have hundreds of thousands of exact matches in the results, especially if you are competing against big website home pages, that you may as well give up.

What Keywords are People Searching for?

That is just the first step of the keyword research. The next step is to go to Google Trends, and by entering keyword research, I get a page that tells me that the top searches related to keyword research are: keyword research tool, keyword tool, Google keyword research, etc.

It also tells me that the top rising search is free keyword tool, then Google keyword, Google keyword tool etc. By finding out what the competition is like, and whether I can compete, and then possibly altering my title, rechecking the exact matches in a Google search's results, I come up with a title that is going to have a lot of searches done on it, and that I can compete for.

To be honest, I usually don't go to these lengths to find my title, I just guess what would be a popular title that would get searched a lot, do a Google search to quickly check the competition, and then I write the article, but if I was going to spend money building a big website, I would want to make sure I had done a lot of keyword research, just to make sure.

Doing keyword research does not take a lot of time really, although you can spend a lot of time doing it, if you are really looking for a large volume of searches, and a title you can compete for.

Writing articles, I would prefer to spend my time writing about subjects I am interested in, rather than finding a topic I don't know anything about, so I can dominate a search. I sometimes use the Google Adwords keyword tool as well, to get lots of complimentary keywords to add into the text of my articles.

There are many other methods of SEO which allow you to compete for the first page of most Google searches, without going overboard with keyword research, but I would suggest you do spend a little time investigating what is out there with the same title, before you start writing. And remember your title is a very important thing.

You can learn more about doing keyword research, finding a niche, building a site, building a list, and selling a product from this article on guest posting.