If you have been hanging around any Internet marketers lately, you have probably heard them talking about keywords. Keywords are what the search engines use to help you find useful content. The words that you type into a search box are the keywords or "keyword phrase" that let the search engine know what you are looking for.

Obviously, understanding how to use keywords can have a considerable effect on the placement of your website in the search engine results. High placement in the results equates to more traffic and hopefully to more sales. Therefore, keyword research is a very important aspect of your online business.

You have probably heard that "long tail keywords" are the easiest to target for SEO purposes. A common myth among marketers is that "long tail" refers to keyword phrases of 3 or more words. This is not necessarily the case, although it seems the norm.

Click on the graph. This represents the results of some research that I did on the keyword phrase "website traffic". The vertical axis is the number of searches per month and the horizontal axis is the individual keywords. You can see that only the first 6 keywords got a large amount of traffic and then the amount of searches tapers off severely.

Notice that the majority of the keywords are located in the long tail that the graph forms off to the right. That is where the name "long tail keyword" came from.

A better description of a long tail keyword would be a low competition keyword. That is why it is easier to get your website listed higher in the search engine listings. There are less people targeting that keyword phrase with their SEO efforts. By the same token, there are usually less people searching for that particular keyword phrase.

The good news is that long tail keywords tend to be more specific which better qualifies the visitor to your website. If you did a good job picking out keywords, that closely match what your website offers, you should have a better conversion rate. This is critical when you are running a pay per click campaign. You want serious buyers clicking on your ads not tire kickers.

The ultimate keyword is one that lots of people search for but has very little competition from other marketers. What I mean by competition is that other people are targeting the keyword in there search engine optimization efforts.

Usually this takes the form of on page optimization.The target keyword phrase will be used:

• In the <title> tags
• In the <a href> anchor text tags

• In the heading <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, tags
• In <strong> or <b> bold tags
• In <em> italics tags

Keywords in between these tags are like flies in the search engine spider's web. The target keyword phrase should also be used in the meta tags, but depending on the search engine, don't pull as much weight as they used to. It doesn't hurt to include them. When it comes to SEO, every little thing helps put you ahead of the competition.

The best way to locate these keywords is to use one of the many keyword services or software to generate a list and then root out the ones with little or no competition. Here are a few good free ones:

• google keyword tool
• word tracker free tool
• keyword discovery tool
• good keywords

These are the best out of the freebies. Until recently, I wouldn't recommend the Google tool because it didn't actually tell you how many searches a keyword got. It showed a little bar graph that was a relative representation. Now it shows you how many searches per month the keywords get and is my top recommendation out of the freebies.

Down to Business, Generate a List of Keywords

Go ahead and pick one or more of the free tools above and make a nice list of keywords. I suggest setting up a spreadsheet with the following columns:

• keyword
• searches
• all in anchor
• exact

Enter in your keywords and the number of monthly searches for each one. Depending on your keywords I would go with at least 20 - 30 keywords. Make sure that the keywords you pick are relevant to your product or website.

Now you want to go to Google and start doing searches for your list of keywords. You will do 2 searches for each keyword. One will be allinanchor:"your keyword phrase" and the other will be "your keyword phrase". Make sure you type in the same format as the bolded words.

Record your results in your spread sheet. Now sort by the column "all in anchor" in descending order. Do you see any keyword phrases near the top that still get a lot of monthly searches? These are the diamonds in the rough that you are looking for.

Now look at the "exact" column. Is the amount of results about the same as the "all in anchor" but maybe a little bigger? If so, you are in good shape. Do you have any keywords that have less than 50,000 results in the "all in anchor" column? If so, you have a very good chance to dominate the Google results with a properly targeted Hub page and a Squidoo lens.

Would you like to have 2 or more of the top ten listings be yours? Go to Google and type in Exit Grabber. You will see a Squidoo lens and a Hub page on the first page of results. Both of them are mine. That is what you can accomplish with properly targeted keywords.

"One of Many Ways To Use Your Keyword Research"

Here is a free report by Brad Callen, the creator of Keyword Elite, about how Micheal Plante used Keyword Elite to find the profitable keywords that enabled him to make $4,515 with Adsense using the arbitrage method.

If you are not familiar with the arbitrage method. It is where you use pay per click to drive traffic to your adsense sites in the hopes that the commissions you get from adsense will be more then the cost of your pay per click campaign. Keyword research is critical for making a strategy like this profitable.

Download your free report here.