Researching the keywords for your web site is a vital part of the search engine optimization process, in doing this you are trying to predict how users / clients will find your web site. This can be a difficult and tedious task, one of the most common problems when it comes to keyword research is the prediction that you know what people will search for to get to your site. This is wrong as the web site owner often thinks that the user will use industry standard lingo where this may not be the case. If a user has nothing to do with your industry, it’s more than likely there not going to know any of the technical language relating to that industry.

The best idea would be to use one of the many keyword tools available on the web. There are many paid solutions and also free solutions, although you may get more with the paid solutions this doesn’t mean you should just ignore the free ones, the data they return could be just as invaluable.
These tools help you judge how popular a certain keyword / key phrase are, they often give you the number of times it has been searched for, how many pages have that keyword on it they may also show you alternatives, more often than not targeting the alternatives may work a lot better for you than trying to target the top search. If you are a new company and work in a competitive industry you are more likely to either pay a lot of money or even struggle to get the ranking your after.
You must also take into consideration the fact that people may misspell your search term, or they may even come from a different country and have different spellings for the same word, is your keyword hard to spell? You may want to try using the alternatives. For example here in the UK and Australia we use “Colour” where as in America they spell it “Color”.
In order for these keywords to work effectively you must have content on the web site about it, although you don’t want to overpower the page with the keyword, look into keyword densities this will give you an idea of how to balance it out.
Pick your keywords carefully as choosing wrong could greatly affect your search engine optimisation, for example if you pick something which has nothing to do with your web site, you may get a good ranking for it, but when the user comes to the site and notices that you are not what they are looking for they will turn back to the search results.

Related posts:

1. Choosing the perfect keywords for SEO
2. Keywords in URL
3. Keyword Density
4. Keeping on top of your SEO!
5. Perfect Keyword Density