To be on the first page of a Google search keyword research is a must. This is the only place to be considering the fact that people do not bother to go beyond the first page when they are searching for something. 42.13% of the people who search on a keyword phrase in Google will click on one the links from the first page only. That is nearly half the number of people that land on a first page that do not bother to look beyond that page. That really tells you something.

This means that the first page is the place to be. How is this possible? If the first page is where you want to be the only way to guarantee it is to perform keyword research. The first thing you have to do is study your competition. There are people who have succeeded in making it to the first page so it is a good idea to look at their statistics. One thing you will want to look for is the age of a website. Websites that have shown that they are stable are given a higher ranking by Google. If you know that your website was created yesterday and the website you are competing with is 10 years old you can decide to move on to another keyword to target.

It is not just the age of a website that you have to concern yourself with; you can also look into the page rank of a website when you are doing keyword research. Every website will have a page rank that goes from 0-10 with 0 being irrelevant and 10 being off the charts important. Sometimes you may find that there are a few websites with a page rank of 0 and it would be easier to compete for a keyword against these websites, but I wouldn't try to compete with a website that has a rank of 10. You can find out the page rank by adding a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox which can be found at http://addons.mozilla.org/addon/321.

There are also the number of links that point back to the websites on the first page. These are known as backlinks and they can be found at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com. If you find that a website has hundreds of backlinks the competition there may be too stiff; it may be advisable to continue your keyword research to include a website that does not have quite so many backlinks pointing toward it. You can also get to work creating backlinks to your website that will rival the backlinks of the other websites, a good tactic anyway.

Also when you perform keyword research there are backlinks that point toward the URL of your competition's websites. Just as with the example of hundreds of backlinks toward the website's page, hundreds of back links toward a URL also means that the competition is too strong. The place to go to look into these backlinks is http://search.yahoo.com. After you have found a keyword phrase that contains websites on the first page that are not stiff compeition for you, give aiming for the first page a try!