Keyword research is the most important aspect of SEO. Is there any traffic for the keyword you're thinking of using? What is the competition like? If you don't have the answers to these questions before you build and optimize your site you will likely be disappointed with the results.You really can learn SEO.
If you are not familiar with keywords they are the words or phrases people type into the search engines to find what they are looking for. When I use "keyword" in this article it will refer to both individual keywords and keyword phrases.
In order to do your keyword research you are going to need to use keyword tools that run from free to expensive. The free one to use is Google Adwords keyword tool you can search for it on Google. If you can afford it I use, and would recommend, Market Samurai. As I'm writing this it's $149 and there is a free trail. Another good one (I've heard) is Keyword Elite. I also use Micro Niche Finder but only for quick research. You need more detail on your competition than it can provide. I would not recommend it as your only tool.
Just in case you are not aware of the two elements involved in keyword research for a SEO campaign they are traffic and competition. You will need to know if there is enough traffic for your keywords to be worth your efforts and also what level of competition you'll be up against. The later can be especially important if you don't have a lot of money to spend. So how much traffic is enough?
Whenever dealing with the level of website traffic you would like for any keyword to end up being well worth your time and effort to try to rank for I generally try to find keywords that have 100 queries a day or more which translates into 3000 per month.The following is ESSENTIAL: you must get these numbers in "exact match"! Not "phrase match" or "broad match" but only "exact match". There are massive differences with the results you receive and nothing but "exact match", as it's title suggests, lets you know the exact amount of traffic a specific keyword gets.
As for competition this is where the actual SEO comes into play and it will be up to you to decide what level of competition you are willing to go up against. You are going to need to analyze the sites that are on the first page of Google to determine the competitiveness of your chosen keyword, a good keyword tool will make this job much easier.
Forget about the competing number of pages you find by searching the phrase in "quotes". You hear many people say to look for terms with less than "30,000" or "50,000" competing pages but this is not the way measure competition. All that tells you is how many sites have the phrase on a page of their site. This is not a measure of how hard or easy it will be to get on the first page.
Here are the elements you need to consider: How many links do the top 10 sites have and what is the anchor text of those links (how many are .gov or .edu, Google loves these), this is greatest determining factor of where sites show up in the SERPs. Next look at Page Rank and domain age- The higher the page rank and older the domain the more Google will trust and value the site. Lastly look at on-page SEO factors like Title and Description Tags. Go here for more SEO help.
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