Having good Internet Marketing research skills is important for establishing a successful online business. You should be aware of concepts such as keyword research, strength of competition, market products, and market testing. If you do not have an understanding of these concepts then this guide has been written for you.Keyword ResearchWhen you have a niche that you would like to market in you will need to find out what keywords people are using to find information in that niche. You can do this by thinking of niche terms. For example in the dating niche, terms could be – dating, pick up, rapport, kissing, love, etc. Take your niche terms and use them in keyword research tools such as wordtracker and Google Adwords tool.At this point you will have a list of long-tail keywords(keywords with 3 or more words). These are the keywords you should aim for because they will most likely have less competition. You will want to take note of the daily searches the keywords get. The next step is to find exactly how many competing sites there are for the particular keywords you choose.This can be done by using keyword research tools or by going to search engine such as Google and putting that particular keyword in quotations. General rule of thumb is to pick long tail keywords that have a high volume of searches and low volume of competition. For example, 1000 daily searches and 100,000 competing sites is pretty good. But keep in mind that the number of competition is not as important as the strength of competition.Strength of CompetitionStrength of competition involves the competing sites’ Alexa rank, page reputation, total pages indexed, total backlinks, page rank of incoming links, relevance of content, their Google page rank, and many others.If the strength of competition is low , even if there is a lot of competing sites, the keyword will be easy to rank for. There are tools like Market Samurai and Micro Niche finder that can help in finding the strength of competition.In the next part of my guide, It will discuss how to find products to sell in your market and how to test your market to see if it has any commercial viability.So in conclusion I hope that you were able to get an understanding of keyword research and strength of competition. Concentrating some of your internet marketing efforts on these two aspects will help your online business succeed.