When you're doing most types of Article Marketing, you'll find that keyword research is one of your first and main steps. I'm going to discuss my own "spin" on article marketing and describe the keyword research I do.

My goal is to find longtailed keyword phrases that have a significant number of monthly searches being done for that exact term with under 5,000 competing websites. Longtailed keywords, by the way, are nothing more than multi-word keyword phrases. It is accepted in the Online Sales & Marketing community that folks searching with a single keyword or two are probably just "browsing"; they're not the "buyers" that we probably want.

I do my keyword research using WordTracker these days for a number of reasons.

First off, I read a very thorough discussion of WordTracker vs Overture when it came to reliable data by a well respected SEO professional, Dr. Andy Williams. It's a long discussion but it convinced me. Read his WordTracker tutorial by clicking the KRA Review link near the end of this article.

Second, there has been a lot of problems using the Overture Keyword Tool in the last few months (this being written March 2007). There was widespread panic among many SEO folks that the Overture Tool was gone forever. It has pretty much been useable the last couple of weeks now but these problems have led me to realize that I do not want to be dependent on Overture.

So, I use WordTracker and to make WT even easier to use, I use a piece of software called "Keyword Results Analyzer" (KRA) developed by Dr. Andy. I simply love this software - it's awesome! It really makes WT easy to use! Click the link in my Author's Bio to check it out!

And, real quick let me dispel a rumour about WordTracker. Many folks think it's expensive to use - it has a yearly price tag of over $250 if I remember correctly. But here's the deal. You're not going to be doing keyword research every day! So what you do is collect 3 or 4 projects that you want to research and then sign up for a one day license to WT.

Then you do all of the keyword research needed for all 4 of your projects and BOOMPA! You've just received 4 projects worth of keyword research for under $10 US! Visit WordTracker try a One Day License for yourself.

In a nutshell, I use KRA to research my niche market and find the terms that have been searched for at least 5 times in the last 24 hours (which should average out to 150 searches monthly) with less than 5,000 websites competing against me for that keyword phrase.

These numbers will produce a number of possible keyword phrases for me and I will then start writing articles and optimizing pages on my website for these phrases.

The next part of this article series will cover submitting articles to Article Marketing directories.

Interested in Article Marketing? Get "How To Avoid the 7 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Trying to Do Article Marketing" by visiting www.MannMadeSoftware.com/YourArticleMarketingAssistant.asp