it never fails to amaze me how many people visit the seo forums asking questions about why their website doesn’t rank, even when they have paid an seo company to do work for them. There was an example today, I took a quick look for him and found numerous problems:

1. The title tags had the company name at the start and some were too long.

2. some prime pages had no text on them, so weren’t even in googles cache.

3. The h1 tag was the same on every page of the website.

Now whilst those issues in themselves do not indicate that keyword research had or hadn’t been done, the fact that all 3 were lacking would  indicate that it hasn’t. The poor guy had paid 2 separate seo firms to do work for him too.

Anyway the point of this is to stress how important it is to do your keyword research right at the start of a project. If you don’t, there is no way of making sure that all the hard work you do isn’t going to be completely wasted.