One of the most important items in SEO but yet its overlooked. In order to drive traffic to your site you need to rank high for keywords that get searched for. Who really cares if you rank number 1 on Google for a keyword that no one searches for. It does you no good.

To go about keyword research smartly you need to first figure out what keywords you would like to target. We will use 'SEO' for an example. Your next step is to go look for some keywords that have to deal with rabbits. To do this you can use wordtracker, keyworddiscovery, or overtures tools to check searches per day. Now remember these are not always accurate searches per day so don't always trust them and compare the results with each other.

Now when you do your search for 'SEO' you are going get a return of popular searches with the word SEO in them. Now you take all of these keywords and run them through a search on Google using the command (allinanchor:keyword). This will return all the results of pages that use that keyword in their anchor text. This will give you a rough idea on how competitive that keyword is. If you return a result less than 1,000 then that keyword is pretty easy to rank for and won't take much effort.

Now once you found a keyword that has little competition and is searched for a decent amount of time per day you can take it to the next step. This would be to evaluate all the sites that are listed in the first page results. To evaluate them you are looking basically on how many incoming links are going to that page. The fewer the better.

Now you just rinse and repeat until you find enough keywords to bring in some decent traffic.