Let's start from the basics. Keywords research IS a crucial key factor nowadays for anyone that is already or want to be active in the online business and run a work at home based business.

Maybe back to the end of the 90's it was possible to think to work from home and start a new business oriented website targeted to a broad market and get to have it successful with a relative limited effort, a basic knowledge and an amateurial budget, simply putting a lot of passion in the work, but these times are gone, and it is very difficult that they will come back again. Hoping that something similar will happen today is just an unreal expectation.

So we arrive to the subject of this article: Keyword Research.

If we make a search on the net to have a DEFINITION of this important concept we can easily find a usuful link like this:

http://marketingterms.com/dictionary/keyword_research/

In brief we can say that "keyword research" means the search of the keywords related to our website, AND the related ANALYSIS to find the most valuable keywords for our online business as well as the ANALYSIS of the COMPETITION for the same keywords.

Well, there is a lot to understand here, isn't it? Prepare yourself, there is a lot more to do after we have clear the meaning of all this in our minds.

This definition in my opinion takes for granted that we are not building a general website that can show totally unrelated stuff messed up together trying to be interesting for anyone using a PC connected to the internet.

It is a quite technical definition that is addressed to people that already have some knowledge about how online business is going in year 2005, and that have already read, or been taught that it is recommended to build business websites targeted to NICHES, that are fractions, small parts, of a sector of an industry or of a market.

So this important concept can be summarised like this:

"When people wanting to run a home based business working from home start the planning of the building of a new website that is business oriented it is good practice to focus on a niche and to research keywords related to a niche instead of to a wide market in order to have to face a smaller competition and be able to generate value and a positive return on their investment".

Does it make sense? I think so, and so think most of the savvy online marketers and gurus nowadays.

Please note right now that keywords research is also crucial if you run PPC ADVERTISING, both for your own website or for AFFILIATE PROGRAMS that pay you commissions. We will return on this later in this article.

Now that we have understood the meaning and the importance of keywords research it's time to move to the practice.

How is it done the important task of keywords researching?

As experienced internet marketers we are able to provide you with a great SHORTCUT that has a small cost and will be able to save you a lot of time, efforts and also money, but we will provide you also some free resources if you really are on a zero budget and need to make some basic researches.

Here is the recommended resource for keywords research, it is a desktop program called "Keyword Locator" that has excellent features and will complete many tasks from a single software.

http://EarnWithGoogle.com/seo/keywordlocator.html

If you only use free resources you will need to use many of them in order to achieve similar results, or even to have done only a part of the tasks of Keyword Locator.

Let's see what you can do with free resources. The first site we suggest is NicheBot.com:

http://NicheBot.com

This site includes keyword count data from different sources, Overture and Wordtracker (only the first 15 results), and add also figures for number of pages for the researched keyword, competition and a ratio. More detailed explanations are available on the site of course.

This website is probably the best free resource you can find as it already summarise data that normally would require you to use different websites to be reached.

Another popular free resource is GoodKeywords.com, that offers a free software to download that allows to do basic keywords researching and provide some other search features. You can go there to download the software for free:

http://GoodKeywords.com

And finally a set of free online tools you can use are offered by InstantPosition.com here:

http://instantposition.com/free_tools.cfm

InstantPosition.com is focused on SEO and provides many valid tools you will surely find interesting; amongst them you can find the keyword suggestion tool and the keyword popularity tool.

As you see we have been there with the free resources. Like everyone else we try to find online what can help us with the lower possible cost, and we all know that lower than free there is nothing.

But we also learned to profit of the experience of those who have been there before us and have developped better solutions and offer them for a small price. And sometimes the solutions developped are small gems that can become invaluable.

This is the case with Keyword Locator. With this software you can do much more than you can do with all the different free resources put together, and of course much easily and quickly.

Keyword Locator is the professional solution to your needs.

In fact you can easily locate in demand niche markets and under exploited keywords in a matter of minutes.

You can complete keywords researching much faster and with less efforts, and pass to the phase of website building much sooner and with more detailed data on your hands.

And you can analyze and expose Your competition as you would not be able to do with only free resources.

All right, do you remember we told you that keyword research is very important also if you advertise in PPC like AdWords or Overture? Well this software is developped to minimise your expense and maximise your revenue from PPC advertising.

There are so many features we cannot report them all here in this article, so here there is again the link to this great software, the best one we have found for keyword researching:

http://EarnWithGoogle.com/seo/keywordlocator.html

We hope this article can be helpful for you and your work at home based business.