Keywords are those words that people type into a search engine when they are looking on the internet for information. If you are interested in selling a product or service, it is your job to target the words or phrases that the customer is likely to use. Since most web pages are found by people using a search engine, this becomes a major source of traffic.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or Webpage Optimization are just fancy words for the process of getting your web page ranked how in the search (page rank). Think about it -- when you do a search. how many times do you go past the top ten listed on page one? Well, maybe you occasionally go to page two to look at the second list of ten. But it is highly unusual that people go past there. They certainly don't go to page 100 or page 1,000.

Your task at hand is tackle the job of finding a topic to get your website ranked in the top ten. You begin the process of targeting these topics with Keyword Research.

To do an effective job at any kind of research, you must have the proper tools. If you talk to 10 different marketers and ask what they use to do keyword research, you will undoubtedly get at least 5 or 6 different answers. It is not uncommon for someone to have a favorite Keyword Suggestion Tool and for it to change within a month or two. At the present time, one of the most popular free ones is seobook.

Nichebot is a paid service that costs around $14 a month. It is a tool you should consider after you become more experienced and are doing more keyword research. A larger list of tools will be presented to you in the Advanced Keyword Research section. That is for another time.

This type of research also helps you gauge the demand for a product. If there is not a market for a product, your job would be to create that market. This is not an easy job especially for a beginner. I do not mean to imply that you have to stick to the extremely popular subjects (weight loss, stop smoking, etc.) where the competition is stiff. However, you do need to decide if there is going to be a large enough market to make money from your hard work.