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Any webmaster should know that SEO begins with proper keyword research. Regardless of whether you are focusing on off-page or on-page SEO, you still need to know how to research and find keywords that will reach your target audience. So here is a guide for you beginners to start your keyword research:

How To Determine Good Keywords - Before you begin targeting a specific keyword, you need to know how easy it will be to get it ranked. You can achieve this by using free tools like Google Adwords Tool that will give you the number of searches made for that keyword. After that your want to find exactly just how competitive that keyword is.

You can find several tools online to help with this. Some are free and some charge fee. They can give you very important information about the first 10 sites on the search results page. This would be:

1. The on-site optimization for that URL, Descriptions & Header tags, and title

2. Pageranks

3. Number of backlinks to that domain

Longtail Keywords - Longtail keywords are keywords containing two or more words. There are fewer searches made for these but there is a good reason for using them in your SEO campaigns.

Longtail keywords most generally are used by webmasters who are farther along in their sales process. These surfers have generally done their searching and didn't find what they want. Now they type in exactly what they want and land on your page.

Longtail keywords can be easier to get ranked for because they will have less competition. This means you can get lots of traffic by targeting your audience with longtail keywords rather than struggling to get to the top in the results pages with keywords that are less specific.

Buying Keywords - If you have a business site that sells product/service then you might want to consider purchasing some keywords. When you use keywords like 'best', 'offer', and 'cheap' usually means the surfer is looking to buy something, and this is the kind of visitor you want to target.

This doesn't mean your focus can't be on finding other keywords. Information keywords can be just as effective because they target people looking for information about something, and if you have the right information and a product/service they just might buy.

All this information can give you solid information for determining how easy it is going to be to rank for your specific keyword, or you can hire an SEO expert to analyze the keywords for you.

You need to spend a lot of time on your keyword research because it is the foundation of your site and SEO work.