What are keywords? Keywords are words or more commonly key phrases that your target audience you want to hit searches. This is one of the most important steps to starting your own online business. You must make a list of keywords in 3 categories, Easy to get, Moderate difficulty, and hard. By difficulty I mean how hard would it be to get into the top 10 of this keyword in search engine results.

Create a list of these keywords and key phrases in order of difficulty. Now, comes the fun part, where to get the keywords and what difficulty to consider them. Well, it works fairly simply. You will use overture's keyword selector tool to see what keywords/key phrases people searched for in 1 month. You can access this tool here: http://inventory.overture.com/.

Find some keywords and get yourself a decent sized list of them, from the ones that were searched a large amount to some of the lower ones. Now, let's analyze the competition for these keywords. You can do this simply by typing in the keyword into your search engine. Then, count the amount of back links it has, Yahoo has an accurate count, DO NOT USE GOOGLE to count back links. They hide back links and will not show you an accurate count. Back to the point, when you count a sites back links in yahoo you type in the search field: link:http://www.competitor.com (replacing competitor.com with your competitors domain name). This result will be a rough count of how many links are incoming to this site.

Note these result numbers and try to get a broad range of competitor's sites for certain keywords so you can analyze your list later on. Note, unless you have a budget of over $5,000 a week you will most likely not be able to get over 50,0000 back links in a year or so, so don't try to get the best keywords right off the bat, you'll be stuck in nowhere land with your site if you do. Target the moderate to low searched keywords for a start, and then you can move your way up as your site achieves rankings.

This should get you started in the right direction for picking the correct keywords.