Keywords are the building block for organic search engine marketing. They are also as important when it comes to paid search advertising. The more precise you can get into your prospects’ mind, the more keywords you target for visitors who are searching for your product or service, the more qualified prospects will flock to your website. Doing proper keyword research is important to drive targeted traffic.

For small business owners who have limited budget, it is more critical to target lots of lower traffic keywords. Why? How do you find these keywords?

First of all, you want to target lower demand keywords because of a few reasons:

1. They usually are more qualified - The term business is highly searched on the Internet but little that you can do with the traffic because they are too broad. It is also extremely hard to rank.
2. Easier to rank higher - If you rank on the top 10 for 100 keywords, which in turn bring in 50 visitors a day, your traffic adds up from there. Lower traffic keywords are usually easier to rank especially in a less competitive niches.
3. Diversification - Having 10,000 visitors a day from a keyword but almost nothing from others means disaster if for one reason your ranking drops. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

With that said, exactly how can we locate those keywords? There are many places you can get your keywords from, namely:

• Your web site log file (access file) - What keywords did the visitors used in the search engines to find you? Examples: awstat, analog, SiteMeter, Google Analytics, and other log analysis and metrics tools.
• Spying your competitors’ websites - There are programs that will analyze what on-page keywords your competitor are targeting. Services are available to let you spy the set of keywords your competitors are using in paid search. Examples: Site Content Analyzer, Hitwise, etc.
• Using various keyword services - Collective users data from search engines are live information about what they are using to search for information or product. Examples: Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Yahoo! Search Marketing Search Term Suggestion Tool, WordTracker, etc.
• Online thesaurus and dictionary - Find synonyms and other triggering words that stimulate new train of ideas around your original keyword.

No man is an island. It applies here as well. No keyword research tool will do everything. Combine two or more of these tools to start with. Keyword research is an ongoing process. It’s not something to do once and forget.

If you want to target more traffic, you always want to add more content around keywords. Some of them occur because of new trends or products. Paid search marketers also constantly search for keywords that return higher ROI.

Of course for small business owners, it is not feasible to buy all keyword products and services. I suggest you start with Yahoo! or Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool and WordTracker. Examine your log files after you have some traffic to get more ideas about how your customers find you.

You may have your own favorites and that is absolutely fine as long as they work for you.