• Though you will focus on your broadest terms in the big picture, do include a mix of long-tail (three words or longer, specific) phrases in your link building. You will see much faster results with long-tail words obviously, and will generate some traffic quicker than the time it will take you to move up in SERPs for the competitive broader terms. This could be ‘Benjamin Moore latex paint’ instead of ‘paint’, or this could be “best latex paints by the gallon”. Point your specific terms to their respective, already-optimized, internal page.

• The most popular terms, the ones that show the most traffic using your favorite keyword tools, are not always the best choices for your particular site for conversion. What items bring you the most profit? What items are less competitive where you can rank quickly? You may want to rank for “Purdy paintbrushes” because they are searched more, but your profit is highest on the cheap no-name brushes you offer “cheap wholesale paintbrushes’

• Which terms are the most clickable for your business? (clickable is spell-check highlighting as though it is not a word! perfectly good word to me!) It would be fantastic to rank highly for “adoption support groups” since the traffic is good and it is an attainable goal, and you do have a support group or two in your directory, but when your listing is displayed for your adoption directory, if the wording is not going to be compelling and all about that term (such as “comprehensive list of adoption and foster parents support groups”), then you will be skipped. High rankings do you less good if the listing is not clicked.

• Watch your AdWords results for ideas and trends, but keep in mind that you may not be getting clicks for important keywords just because your bid is lower on that term. Use the results, but use common sense as well. Same thing for your current organic traffic. We had a client that did not want to use a term because he had no traffic for that term. Well without the ranking, of course there is no traffic. It was an important term and we convinced him to include it.

• Choose words that stick, and drop words that don’t. If you are moving up for some words more quickly than others in your linking and SEO efforts, build on those first while you have the momentum.

Keyword Discovery offers a paid search tool that is quite robust. They offer a free version which is limited in features but still quite usable and helpful. The paid version I have not used, but the features look like you can really get down and dirty with your research, looking at keyword by niche, showing the most popular searches in a particular industry.

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

Wordtracker is the other popular paid keyword suggestion tool, and their free version is quite useful. you can only enter one word instead of comparing multiple words. Wordtracker offers a free trial for their more robust product for 7 days.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

SubmitExpress has a free tool called Keytracker that gauges the traffic of words, comparing those two popular keyword tools. You can enter more than one keyword, and It makes suggestions and shows the traffic for suggested or similar words as well.

http://keywords.submitexpress.com/keytracker.php

For keyword suggestions, Google offers its keyword tool for free, which will suggest keyword combinations based on either phrases you enter, or will analyze an existing web page. Then it does show the search traffic for those words. Another helpful free tool, recommended.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Microsoft’s Adcenter offers the Keyword Forecast tool. It will compare traffic for a few keywords in graph form, and does not require you to type in letters verifying you are a human, saving time for a quick look. The data seems to be about a year old though:

http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Forecast/Default.aspx

SEO Book offers a keyword research tool that compares data from many sources in one view. You can get lost in this one. You can only enter one word at a time, and it does not make the best suggestions compared to the others, but the info correlated is very robust, linking to the different keyword tools and search engines that it used to populate the info, showing the other suggestions and traffic from search engines. Fun toy.

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/