An important part of any online business is doing keyword research and rounding up a list of important keywords to attract surfers to your site (think SEO). Whether it is for your pay-per-click campaigns or for creating content pages for your site, these keyword research tips will help you find targeted keywords.

Step 1 - Brainstorm You should make a list of all the obvious keywords that come to mind. Don't limit yourself and get all the related terms in on big list. For example, if I was doing a weight loss site, I would start with the obvious ones like;

weight loss diet-losing fat-exercise-healthy eating

Step 2 - Check the competition. With the list I just made, I would try each of them in search engines and notice the top ten sites that come up in the results. I would then check the keyword meta tag in the HTML source code. I would note every keyword and write them on my list. This is an important keyword research tip. Your are taking notice of your competition in order to beat them right?

Step 3 - Keyword list drill down. You now have a list to work with. It is now time to expand your search. Check out http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and use this tool to see how many searches every day there are for your keywords and note every related keywords that get at least 10 searches a day. You can also use Google keyword research tool. List every misspelled keywords also. Some people use "web site" while others type "website". Remember that hyphens are treated as space by search engines.

Step 4 - Sizing up the competition. You should have hundreds if not thousands of keywords on your list by now. Make sure you clean up your list for non-related terms. For example, If my weight loss site doesn't have anything to do with Atkins diet, ditch any keywords that include "Atkins". Use Google to see how many competing sites you have for your keywords. Just use quotes around your keywords to see how many phrase match you get. Notice how many competing results you get.

Step 5 - Prioritizing Your should now concentrate on using the keywords with less than 15000 competing results. Use those in your articles, content web pages, etc.

Using software for keyword research will save you a lot of time. some have an added feature that list the number of pay-per-click campaigns for those keywords. This is very useful when you want to see how much it will cost you for competing in this area.

Use every keyword that will bring you the most targeted visitors. You will find it is much easier to get on the first page of search engines with keyword phrases that have at least 3 or 4 terms.

After all this work, your keyword research tips will put you ahead in the search engines ranking.