As long as Overture was up-to-date, KW research was relatively easier and was pretty popular with most webmasters. Google keywords tool, although is pretty good, has some complex realities that many new webmasters find hard to understand. I use a rather simple approach which I think is good for starters. I take a base keyword/phrase which is my site's theme, and run the tool. While picking the resulted KWs, I go by comparing the advertising competition and the most recent search volume. My steps for this are: maximum advert comptn coupled with high recent search volume High advert comptn with maximum recent searches Low advert comptn with high recent searches The last one may not give targeted adverts or high CPC ads but help attract traffic and thereby better ranking. In the next step, I contrast these keywords and related keywords (different combinations of above keywords) using Google trends. The one that has the best recent trend wins over as the theme keywords for me subject to the next step. Third step for me would be too find-out the competition for them. Operator "allintitle:KW" on Google gives the number of real serious competitors for that KW/s and thus you know what you are up against. Lower the competition (within six figure numbers) the better as you have picked up the KW for its high search volume. If competition factor is very high (in millions), I will go for a keyword/phrase which has the next best search volume and repeat my research all over again. This may not be the best practice but you know it is free and almost reliable. Only difficulty for newbies may be with reading the keyword results which are not in specific numbers but graphical. What do you say?