What is Keyword Research?
Internet Marketing Dictionary | Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of finding out which keywords are used by people doing searches who are most likely to be valuable visitors to your website.

The ideal keyword discovery is one that is used by a large number of people and that your competitors don't know about. This applies both to SEO work and pay per click advertising work.

A typical internet marketer will use a range of keyword research tools such as Keyword Elite and Market Samurai. There's also a service provided by WordTracker that tells you search volumes for any given keyword together with a keyword efficiency index. This KEI is a simple measure of the opportunity presented by a keyword because it assesses search volumes and the number of websites competing to get traffic from that keyword to let you know how difficult it's going to be to rank well for it.

One of the principles behind keyword research is that people search using an amazingly wide range of terms - the so called Long Tail of Search. One implication of the long tail is that you are unlikely to be able to think up all the potential keywords people will use when looking for websites. Hence the development of keyword research tools.