The first thing you need to know in order to do a keyword search is: what is a keyword? A keyword is simply a word or phrase that someone would type into their browser window to find a particular product. A long tailed keyword is a keyword phrase made up of 3 or more words.

For example, let's say I was looking for a guide on how to house train a dog. I would type in the phrase: how to house train a dog.

If you are selling a guide on how to house train a dog you would want to know how many people are using that exact phrase and how much competition you have. There are many software products you can use to make this process a little easier, but if you are starting out on a small budget you can also do a keyword search for free.

The first thing you need to do is determine what keywords you want to target for your business. Once you have a list of appropriate keywords you need to find out the search volume (you want it as high as possible) and the competition (you want this no higher than 5,000). To do your keyword search for free use the free keyword tool from Google. Just do a search for 'Google keyword tool'.

Once you have a list of the keywords that will work for your business that have a fairly high volume of searches you need to determine how much competition each keyword has.

To see how much competition you have all you need to do is type in your keywords into your browser window, one at a time. You want to type them in with quotes. This is very important. Even though most people don't search with quotes you need to do all keyword searches with them. Why? Because if you don't you will get an inaccurate picture of your competition.

If you type your search in without quotes your results will list any websites that have those words on a page. They may not be in order or even in the same sentence. For example, the term I used above, how to house train a dog. If I typed that into my browser without quotes I would get back results that had all of those word in, but not in that order.

So instead of sites that only had the phrase how to house train a dog, I would get results from sites that had the word train, dog, house,etc. Of course this is way too broad and so it will make your competition look much higher than it actually is.

The number of results you get will let you know if the keyword phrase will work for you or if it has too much competition. Remember, you want the competition to be below 5,000.

That's the basics of doing a keyword search. Once you have a good list of highly searched keywords with low competition you can really start generating a steady flow of highly qualified visitors to your website. And, hopefully, those visitors will turn into customers!