Research is the most crucial step in promoting your web site. For example, you sell home décor. If the content within your site does not contain the keywords that your customers use to find sites like yours, all the optimization in the world will prove fruitless. For example, you place emphasis on the keywords, "home, decor" but your customers are searching for "home decoration" or "home furnishings." Surely they will never find you, or your site's rank order may be #2343 where no one would ever look. It is important to get into the heads of your customers and figure out how they think and search on the web. This is why companies spend thousands of dollars in focus groups and market research. Since this may not be feasible for a small business, here are some tips in accomplishing your research.

Web sites
There are web sites such as Word Tracker that assist you in finding keywords relevant to your industry. You can sign up for a free trial and get the information you need quickly. The beauty of this site is that it allows you to do a cross-reference search of certain keywords in order to find other relevant ones.

The competition
One sure fire way to find keywords is to look to a successful competitor and see what keywords they are using. Simply viewing their web site and HTML source is not enough. Often, the Meta tags don't give enough information about what influenced the rank order. Once you feel confident about the keywords people use to find sites like yours, do a search and make note of which sites are in the top 10. Then go to those sites and figure out the keywords that appear to be prevalent and use those. Never copy and paste content from other sites into yours as this could be considered as copyright infringement.

Independent focus groups
Just because big companies have deep pockets and do formal focus groups doesn't mean you have to. Make this into a fun event by inviting friends and family to an Internet café or somewhere with a few computers. Treat them to refreshments and ask them to visit a search engine you have pre-determined. Then ask them to imagine they are looking for a company like yours and make note of what they type after they make the search. Ask them to stop after they performed the search so you can make note of which search terms they used. The search terms are always visible at the top and bottom of the results page. The more people you can get to do this, the more data you will have to work with. Once you are done, put all your data into Excel or Word and figure out how many times certain terms have been repeatedly used. The ones that were repeated the most should be used in your SEO campaign.

Targeting Keywords
It is important to consider how popular your keyword combinations are. Targeting "home decor" may be too broad as there may be over 2000 companies competing for this combination. It may be more effective to target "home decor dallas." Including the geographic region may prove easier in achieving higher rank order especially if you're concerned with walk-in traffic over online sales. If you are targeting the U.S. or the whole planet, specializing in niche products may be the edge you need. People tend to search the web for hard to find products and leave the generic stuff to local shops or sites like Amazon.com.

Paid vs. Organic Promotion
The most challenging method of promoting your site is the organic method. Organic promotion involves submitting your site to free or open directories and search engines and working to improve rank order. With organic promotion, the idea is to submit your sites to the search engines and directories and refine content and popularity until your site is ranked high.

There are several methods of paid promotion. Directories like Yahoo will allow you to pay a premium for expedited consideration. This means that you will be considered for inclusion faster and is not a guarantee that your site will be listed. Another method is paid placement or sponsorship. There is a certain section on each search engine or directory that paid listings are placed in. This is usually at the top, the bottom or the far right. Sites such as Overture allow you to bid for a keyword combination and places the highest bidder as #1, the second highest as #2 and so on. Google offers a similar service called AdWords.  Each time someone clicks a paid link to your site, you are charged the bid price. The problem with paid placement is that the bid price for #1-#3 will always increase especially for popular keywords. This can get quite expensive especially when non-customers such as salespeople click-through to your site just to cold-call you. It is recommended that if you choose paid placement, you pick a keyword combination that is not too broad. Sometimes targeting a geographic location can provide better quality clicks.