Keyword research is absolutely critical if you want your ad to get on the first page of Google results. The more accurate your keyword research is, the better your ranking and the more you will earn. The goal is to develop a highly-targeted list of keywords that are popular and fit your product or service. Developing this list is the first and most important step of internet marketing.

A lot of people use the Overture Suggestion Tool (www.overture.com) to gather keyword research. This program is free and can give useful information; however there is room for error that can skew your results. Overture assigns a search count for each of the terms in its database but this information can be falsely inflated.

Any automated keyword search tool (like Overture) accounts for the times that a search term is searched on the web and within the search tool itself. So if you see that there are over 100,000 searches for your item those numbers include the times that other affiliate marketers have searched for that term in Overture itself. It's a false representation of customer interest in that term.

The second flaw with Overture and other automated search tools is that the terms are often rearranged. For example, if you were to type in ?8 hour work day? you may get a result that reveals ?8 day work hour.? If you based a campaign on these results, you might have a #1 ranking for your phrase yet still get little or no traffic.

So what is the solution? There are more accurate keyword search tools like Wordtracker that can help. If you are using Wordtracker, use the ?keyword universe? feature. Start with a comprehensive search if you are beginning with a generic keyword (like tennis or cosmetics). Input your starting keyword into the ?keyword universe? search box.

After the results appear, scroll down and look for the top 3 to 5 terms that best fit what you are looking for. You can click on the first of those terms and navigate through the resulting terms and add any to your list that will be possibly beneficial. Wordtracker will allow you to put these results into a ?basket? so you can use them for additional research.

Once you go through each list for your top 3 to 5 terms, continue with the ?competition search? function. Finally, use the ?export to e-mail? function to get the results sent to your e-mail. You will now have a targeted keyword list to work with.