Keyword research is an essential aspect of internet marketing.  It enables you to setup your site for SEO purposes or pick profitable keywords for PPC.  Taking half an hour to to use any of the popular keyword research tools out there will provide you a significant advantage over the majority of your competition. This is because most internet marketers either are too lazy to do any keyword research at all, or aren’t doing it correctly.

Keep in mind that not all keywords have the same value.  Some keywords have too much competition and you will have a hard time ranking well with them.  Other keywords are useless because nobody is searching for them.  This is where using good keyword research tools is important.  The best part is that a lot of nice tools won’t even cost you any money.

My favorite program for keyword research is called Market Samurai.  Although the full version of the program does cost money, the keyword research part is absolutely free.  Plus it runs on all platforms which is very nice.  To begin using Market Samurai, you first need to enter in a niche related keyword.  For example, lets say you are starting a site centered around the best guitar courses online. Then you might want to enter in the keyword “play guitar”.  Market Samurai will then output you a large number of keywords related to this seed keyword.  Market Samurai allows you to then further analyze all of these keywords and find out which ones have high traffic and low competition.

To pick out the high traffic keywords, Market Samurai uses a metric called SEOT.  This number tells you how much traffic the number 1 ranked site for that keyword should get.  To find low competition keywords, Market Samurai utilizes a metric called SEOC.  This is the number of websites in Google that mention your specific keyword in the index.  As a rule of thumb, you want to find keywords that have a SEOC value under 30,0000.  Market Samurai also allows you to filter out the keywords that don’t meet your specific criteria.  This makes it extremely easy to generate a list of nice keywords.

As a member of PPC Coach, I know how essential it is to have a good keyword list.  There are only a tiny number of keywords that actually lead to sales and finding those money keywords is the key to setting up a profitable pay per click campaign.  That is why everyone should be using Market Samurai for their keyword research needs.