Many of the marketers and business owners that I speak with are highly interested in being highly ranked in search engines--especially Google. Many have gone to the trouble of performing some surface level research on the basics of search engine success: things like meta tags, title tags, and incorporating keywords and phrases into the site's text.

But one of the key issues that is surprising to people involves keyword selection. I have found that those keywords and phrases that you assume will be successful are often not. Using software tools, we often explore the real data reflecting the words/phrases that searchers are using and how often they are being used.

I'm usually surprised when I look at the search volume of various terms (which I assume to be popular) in contrast to those phrases which are similar in nature. For example, I once saw that 'personal injury law' didn't have close to the level of search volume as 'auto accident attorney.' Humans search differently than that of the marketer's perception. Keyword research is essential to search engine success.

Brian Clark has a great piece on his blog describing the art of keyword research and why it is important.