Checking competition and traffic

When you are looking to market any business online you need to start with a list of keywords and phrases that you want to get your site ranked for on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Deciding on these can be tricky as you cannot just pick a list off the top of your head, you need to carry out some research. You need to be realistic about the phrases you chose if you are serious about getting ranked for them. For example, one word keywords are extremely competitively as are certain areas such as London or Birmingham. When choosing your keywords have a mixture of long tail (3 or 4 word phrases), location based keywords and more competitive keywords. You may find that very quickly you can rank highly for the long tail and certain location phrases, but the others may take more time and more content to start to show up where you want them to in the results.