Successful online marketing depends on keyword research. While after doing some keyword research it’s not really difficult, it is an area that will help you increase your online traffic. Mastering keyword research takes practice and a lot of trial and error, but as you continue to research, you’ll become more and more adept at finding the keywords that search engines are looking for, and therefore increase your traffic.

When starting to do keyword research, the best tool to use is the Google Keyword Tool. This is a free tool and it is available to everyone, but to get the maximum benefit, you need to be logged into Google, this is easy to do if you have a Gmail account or other Google services account. The difference between signing in and not signing in to the Keyword Tool is that with a Google account, when you do a keyword search, you’ll get up to 800 keyword ideas instead of just a few.

Once you sign in, start by entering your keyword or phrase like make money online. Then, on the left side of the page, scroll down to where it says Match Types. Now depending on what you are doing if you have to choose between broad, exact or phrase. Let’s say you want to target a specific phrase to use in a PPC ad on Google or Microsoft/Bing, then click the box next to “phrase” and go to the next step. I’ll use Phase for this example.

The next step is to go to the area that says advanced filters and options and depending on whether you want to search for keywords only for US searches or all countries or some other specific country or even language, click the appropriate box and Choose my example I will use all countries and English.

Then click search. You will get two different options, one is keywords and the other is ad group ideas that you could use to put together different ad groups for your blogs, PPC or SEO advertising. Let’s use the actual keywords found. In our Make Money Online example, the tool shows 800 different keywords related to the phrase. You then choose the keywords you want to use for your blog or advertisement that will get you searched for by the many search engines.

One thing you could look at is the number of global monthly searches or local monthly searches. If you want to get a global ranking, look at the global monthly searches. Now here’s a little tip if you want your ad, article or blog post to rank high in, say, Google for a particular keyword phase, look at the number of searches for a particular keyword and search hidden gems that are searched, say, 1000 to 3000 times. and experiment using them as the competition will be less and the chances of appearing on the first page of Google for that search will be higher.