If you want to boost your website's search engine ranking, keyword research is a vital component in the process. If you happen to target the wrong keywords, customers and search engines might not even know your site exists.

This means you are losing potential revenue, wasting time and gaining rankings that are irrelevant. To get ahead and stay competitive, you have to choose much more wisely.

The actual keyword research process involves several different steps…

One of the most important things to remember along the way is that you might not know what keywords customers use to find your site. Even if you think you do, you probably don't.

To really understand what they are looking for and how they are looking, you have to research your niche market.

To maximize your keyword research, implement these 5 tips:

1. Create a keyword list. Start out by creating a list of every potential keyword or phrase a customer might use to find your site. Think in both broad and very focused terms.

Brainstorm keywords that cover all of your products or services. Try to avoid really generic terms. Instead, focus only on keywords that are very relevant, but not necessarily obvious. Take a look at competitors websites and see what keywords they use.

2. Get a keyword research tool. With a keyword list in hand, you need to dig deeper to uncover the hidden gold!

A keyword research tool will help you find more related keywords you most likely missed in your list creation. Among other things, it will also give you an idea how many people search for your specific keywords each month.

Ad Word Analyzer is a solid and effective keyword tool to use for this task. As you're researching keywords, you be sure to keep an eye on how competitive they are too (eg. the number of ads and competing websites on Google).

This can help you decide how much effort to put into trying to rank for each keyword. If there's too much competition, you might consider trying to rank high for a number of long tail keywords (4 - 6 word phrases) instead.

3. Refine your keyword list. Once you've done your research, it's time to fine-tune your keyword list choosing only the keywords you want to focus on. It's usually best to choose 5 - 10 keywords to start with.

You can always use more keywords from your keyword list later on to build additional pages. In fact, you should plan on doing this. Search engines love when you add content slowly, but consistently over time.

4. Execute your plan. With your keywords in place, it's time to make sure your website is optimized correctly. This means tweaking existing content and even adding more content. You should develop new pages to support the keywords based on what kind of content will work best (I prefer 500 - 600 word articles).

When writing, or having it done for you, make certain the keywords are used naturally and don't feel like they've been added for the sake of "stuffing" them into the content.

It also doesn't hurt to use your keywords in your Web page title tags, meta description tags, meta keyword tags, Alt text, anchor text and navigational links.

5. Keeping up with it all. Even after the initial round of keyword optimization is over, you'll find you need to frequently re-evaluate your strategy. If you find that some keywords aren't ranking well, make changes.

Tweaking is to be expected and normal. Not to mention, diligence can put you in the forefront and keep you there!