Finding good and profitable keywords for your site is the hardest part of SEO

This is a list of "do's and don'ts" that can provide a good starting point.

Strategies to Try:

Use the Google keyword planner [free]. This is useful tool, as it gives you a list of keywords that may be relevant and profitable to your site. As always, manually weed out the ones that are unlikely to produce results or are unrelated to your business. EX: when looking for web hosting keywords, the planner may also display webbed fishing nets.
Go for keywords with a good "CPC" (cost per click). The best way to determine the CPC of a keyword is by using Google's keyword planner.
Use Long Tail Keywords, which are simply phrases people may use to find you. Example: web hosting, web hosting chicago, managed web hosting, web host. These may not get a lot of traffic, but are nuggets that may pull a few hits per month. And it all adds up.

Strategies to Avoid:

Don't use keywords with a CPC higher than $1 (or even better: less than that). Extremely popular keywords could cost $10 or more. I have seen some over $100. Don't bother with those unless you can drop a lot of money! Trying to stay under $1 per click makes the most sense for most businesses.
Don't "over-stuff" your pages or articles. Some people tend to use too many keywords in their articles (5 or more), it's not something you should do.
Don't use keywords with a low monthly search volume (less than 1,000 in most cases). If you do that, you'll either get no results or very few.

As always, we are here to help if you need marketing support. Just call us!