Keyword research is the process of finding out what words and phrases people are searching for using Google and other search engines in order to find information on specific topics. You can use the keywords you find in two basic ways: either as keywords to optimize a specific webpage for, or keywords to bid on for PPC.

In both cases, you're ideally looking for a keyword or keyphrase that has high search volume (i.e. lots of people searching for it) but low competition (either people writing about or optimizing for that phrase, or bidding on it in PPC).

We recommend you use the free SEO tool Traffic Travis which helps you come up with hundreds of keyword ideas, complete with the daily search count. You can then use the SEO Analysis tool to check the competition of the top 20 pages that rank for that keyword.

In addition, use Google Keywords. It's free, accurate and comprehensive.

You can also use tools like the Google Keyword Tool or the Free Wordtracker tool as well. It's good to get keywords from a variety of sources, as each method gets their results from different places and processes them slightly differently.

If you're planning to use PPC advertising, I recommend you check out our PPC Guide.

If you're building a website, you want to find a list of 25 to 35 keywords which you want to target. These will all have a relatively high number of searches, with a low to moderate level of competition. Check out this Affilorama lesson on evaluating competition in SEO.

The best idea is then to take each of these keywords and write an optimized article for each one. Check out the next lesson, Introduction to SEO, for more information on this.