When I first started trying to make money online the concept of a keyword really, really confused me. I found it so intimidating that basically I ignored the concept. That was a big mistake - it led me to developing several websites - which never got any visitors. Why no visitors? Simple - no one was searching for the subject that my websites were about! All a keyword - or more usually a keyword phrase is is a term people search and find your website from. There are three things to look for in a good keyword: demand, competition, and buying power.

Think about this way - if you had two websites: one about the development of art during the Italian Renaissance and the other about the life and times of Michael Jackson - which do you think might get more visitors? Some topics are just more popular than others - and ignoring keywords mean that you have no idea how many people really are searching for topic of choice. Its a good idea to discover if there is at least some demand before you put hours of work in developing the website.

Popular topics in themselves aren't the end of everything - for some really popular topics - like certain celebrities or weight loss you will be up against hundreds of thousands of competing websites - that's tough - its not impossible - but its not a good place to start as a beginner.

Thirdly not any keyword will do - say you find a term which is both reasonably often searched - say about 1000 searches a month, and has less than 50,000 competing sites (trust me that's quite low) - you may still find it's a website which is hard to make money from. Whether you like it or not making money online is about finding people who want to buy something from either you or your advertisers.

I avoid any keywords which have the word "free" in them - clearly someone looking for "free WordPress themes" doesn't want to spend money. Also avoid keywords where people really are unlikely to buy from your website - do you think many people will really buy a vehicle online - sight unseen?

General terms are fairly useless too e.g. if you live in a small town you may think "Smallstown information" or "Smallstown news" might qualify as a keyword phrase worth pursuing - but think about whether someone who just wants local information is really ready to buy anything from you - maybe they just want that information!