Keyword research should be the first thing you do before you even start a new blog. If you ever want to make money online or make money blogging for that matter, then you need to understand how important it really is to know how to do proper keyword research.

Not only that but you should also understand that the time to do keyword research is before you buy a domain and start a new site or blog.

This is easily one of the most misunderstood aspects of internet marketing...the keyword research. I think at first it seems to make sense to most newbies that you would want to target a keyword that gets lots of traffic, so you can make a lot of money.

The more traffic then more money there is to be made. This is true of course but not easily done! In fact, it is almost impossible for a newbie to target a high traffic, high competition keyword and be successful. There are real pros out there dominating those keywords...you don't stand a chance.

Somewhere along the road even the newbies learn that the way to go is with long tail keywords. Yes there is just a fraction of the traffic that the top keywords get but, this is actually to our advantage.

While the big boys are dominating and fighting over the top keywords, we can easily dominate the long tail keywords because they are much less competitive. All newbies should target long tail keywords. These are phrases three to six or even seven words long. Usually though long tails are around three to five words long, but some are longer.

Once you realize that long tail keywords are the way to go, you must then learn to narrow it down even more. You should try to find an easy target so that you increase your chances of tasting success.

The KEI is an important figure in keyword research. The KEI (keyword effectiveness index) is a search to results ratio basically. The higher the KEI the better the chances you have to be successful with this keyword. A good KEI is about 4oo or better. Sometimes you will see some terms with crazy high KEI...like over 300,00. This is a nice way to narrow down your keyword selection even more.

Once you find a group of long tail keywords and you begin to narrow down your choices and check the KEI then what? Now you can check to see how much money is in the keyword. I actually do this part first as it gets me excited. You just go to Google adwords and use the keyword tool there.

Type in your keyword and it will tell you how much the advertisers are paying per click. If you put adsense on your blog, and it is optimized for a certain keyword, you are going to trigger some of the ads in your niche to appear on your blog.

You will get anywhere between twenty percent and fifty percent of what the advertiser is paying to Google. So you want to make sure there is some money in your keywords if you plan to use adsense to monetize your blog.