Keyword research is needed to ascertain which words or phrases you need to focus your attention on to attract the right visitors to your website. The more of your keywords you can rank well for, the more qualified traffic you will get. Ideally you want to aim for the top three positions for your many keywords and phrases but it is important to be realistic. If for example, you are a small business selling websites then you will probably not get to number one for the words “websites” or “buy websites” but you may get on to the first page for long tail phrases such as “website companies Northampton”.
Try to optimise your website for middle and long tail keywords that aren’t longer than 4 or 5 words. Help improve your rankings by creating appealing and well-optimised title tags and meta descriptions to increase the Click Through Rate from the organic search results such as on google.
There are some great tools available for you to use to find out which keywords you may want to target and the likely traffic you can get from them. Some of these tools are free and others come with a monthly or annual subscription fee.