Choose your niche. Once you have decided on your niche you can then start to research your keywords. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with a keyword that describes your niche. For instance if you want to advertise for pest control, your main keywords would be pest control. Not too hard, but the problem here is many other sites are probably already ranked in Google for pest control, so you need to find keywords that are relevant to your niche and still get several keywords a month.

A lot of marketers use the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index). It isn't perfect but what it does is figures how much competition you have compared to how many monthly searches there are. The formula looks like this: (S^2/C) which means the number of searches times 2, then divided by the number of competitors. Usually the number is included on paid keyword tools. Not everyone goes by this number because it can sometimes be misleading if there are a small number of searches or competitors, so it is wise to check the actual searches and the actual competitors before you decide on a keyword to target.

If you can find a good number 50+ searches a day (the more the better) and there is a KEI over 4 you should be able to target this keyword. You should start by choosing some keywords in your niche. If all the keyword phrases have the same root keyword phrase then this will help. However more internet marketers are learning to find more broad keywords in order to get more searches, because long tail keywords often get so little traffic. An example of this is the pest control niche would be: getting rid of ants (or mice).

If you can go through and find several broad keywords to target different pages of your site on then you will be able to find which page gets the most traffic and later on you can find the long tail keywords that go with each broad keyword.

Another excellent way to get keyword ideas is to use some free keyword research tools. The free tools on Google Keyword Tool and Free Wordtracker are very helpful and show you how many searches there are for keywords. The Google Adwords keyword research tool will also suggest lots of related keywords that can help to give you more ideas. After you find out the number of searches, check on the search engine for the number of competitors, if you have a lot of searches (over 500) a month and few competitors (under 10k) you have a doable keyword.

There are always advances in keyword research so it is good to have a place where you will be notified of any keyword related tools. Most internet marketing forums should be useful for this.