This is probably the most important step in any SEO activity and I cannot stress enough on its importance. While keyword research and KEI analysis might sound to be too technical for a SEO newbie, the basic idea is very simple. You need to identify your target market and find the keywords that someone might use to search for a site like yours. If you have a good understanding of the business you are in, you would not have a hard time to figure out which are the keywords that your customers might be using to search for you. Pick the main keywords that you can think of and then use the tools like Overture Keyword tool or Wordtracker to find other similar keywords. These tools would also give you the number of searches that were conducted on those keywords during previous month ( hit count ), make a note of those. Once you have got a good number of keywords and their Hit count, search for each of those keywords in Google and note the number of sites competing for each of those keywords ( on the top right side the figure shows up as “1 to 10 of ***** results” ). Once you have these data with you, you can start to pick up the keywords that you would like to optimize for. You need to look for a few things..