What is Keyword Research?
The search for keywords related to your Web site, and the analysis of which ones yield the highest return on investment (ROI). Wordtracker is a very good place to do your research.

Why is Keyword Research So Important?
Professional keyword research is an important part of any website’s search engine marketing strategy. It is the fundamental building blocks of any web business online. Whether you are using professional keyword research to do SEO or PPC, it is important you do keyword research and analysis correctly from the start.

Here are a couple of things you might want to consider when doing professional keyword research.
1. Define Your Target Audience
It’s important you know the target audience you have for your web business. In particular, pay attention to technical lingo in the particular industry your web business is in.
Some industries may have certain keyword phrases that are instantly recognizable within that industry. For example, the IT/tech industry has many technical lingo words. For example backup software, backup tapes may have terms such as DAT, DAT24 etc
Targeting these keyword phrases may be easier and identify your web business better with prospective customers.
2. Competition Level
Usually, I would recommend to people to choose highly targeted keyword phrases to build their webpage. There are two reasons for this. First, it is a lot easier to rank for these keyword phrases since there will be lesser competition for these keyword phrases.
The second reason is keyword phrases usually can bring in more targeted visitors than a one word keyword. For example, the keyword computer is very general. It is very difficult to rank well for such keywords and the visitors that visit your website based on this keyword may not be your target audience.
3. Professional Keyword Research Tools
If you were doing keyword research and analysis manually, you will probably give up after some time. It can be extremely tedious and time wasting. That is why a good professional keyword research tool is important. It can help you do the grunt work.
Two of my favorite keyword research tools are the google adword keyword tool. It is free. You just type in a keyword and it will bring up data such as search volume, competition, and synonyms. The downside is it does not provide enough detailed data
The other is nichebot which provides more in depth information on the keyword and allows you to dig in depth based on a given keyword
- Before You Start
Before you start trying to optimize your website, you should need to do a bit of research. This may sounds odd to a lot of web publishers, but before you do anything you need to do some keyword research. There are many different resources that you can go to and all you have to do is type in a subject and you can be given a list of the most commonly searched phrases relating to this topic. Why is this important? The reason is because that when you are optimizing your website you are not just optimizing for the search engine spiders, you are also optimizing for the web surfer that uses the search engines. For instance, if you have a website that is about golf you may find that the typical web surfer does not just type in golf but types in golf club or golf and then the city or state that they are interested in golfing in.
The phrasing is important because you can target your audience by incorporating the most common phrases. You would not want to simply use the keyword "golf" because there are millions of other websites that are also using the term golf and your website will literally get lost in the crowd. Instead, you will want to choose more of the specific keywords that your visitors will be likely to type into the search engine. When you have done this research, you will know which keywords that you should try to focus on and associate with your website.
Keyword research will not take you a lot of time; in fact it can take just minutes to perform. It may take you a bit longer to actually integrate these keywords in healthy amounts into your website. You do not just want to write up a bunch of fluff that will use the keywords as this is not how you can improve your pagerank and be seen. You want to improve your pagerank and then provide consumers with the service, product, or information that they are looking for when they visit your website.
Now you can probably see why many web publishers have a hard time actually optimizing their website! Optimization is something that happens slowly over time. Those that try to rush the process usually end up doing more damage than good, simply creating more work than was necessary. Keyword research is a significant task in order to optimize any site.

Keyword Research Tools
Many of you probably already use the keyword research tools available at Overture, Google, and Wordtracker. By all means, keep using these tools. They provide great data for keyword research.
For long-term keyword analyses, I gather monthly data from Google, Overture, and Wordtracker. Additionally, I review related search results on Yahoo, Business.com, and Teoma. By researching all these resources, instead of just one, I can determine which specific keyword phrases are the most popular on all these Web search engines and look for a common denominator. I can also see subtle differences among the engines. Some searches are more popular on one engine than another.
For many sites, creating a keyword phrase calendar is a good strategy. The construction industry tends to be more active in warmer months than colder ones. The cold and flu season is coming up in the U.S., which has implications for pharmaceutical and health-related Web sites.
By creating a calendar based on keyword research over years, site owners know what pages to create for timely "natural" search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns and what ads to create for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.