Without the right keywords you're either invisible, or visible to the wrong visitors, either way that means lost opportunity. In order to get any serious organic serious from the search engines you need to be in the top page of searched keywords/Phrase. So It's very important to understand where to find the right sources and tools that will guide you in the keyword analysis process so your final selection is in line with your marketing objectives, competitive landscape and pertinent with your sites content.

The right keywords will guide you in your content and copywriting for your sites various pages, white papers, pdf's and any search engine crawlable content available from your site. You have to think of every page on your site as a landing page and optimize each one individually to maximize your exposure to targeted visitors.

Some of the many errors that I come across regularly are sites that focus on their brand name or some unpopular keyword/phrase that the site owner considers important but are never searched. Some try to position all their keywords on their home page neglecting to optimize the really important ones and diluting their chances at positioning for any of them. Positioning for keywords where your content is weak or dull and doesn't retain visitors is also a common oversight that kills your efforts. Some focus on those really competitive keywords where all the top pages in SERP's enjoy a very high PR(Page Rank) while your competing page's PR is very low. All of these errors undermine your efforts and investments in natural search result visibility.

They are many tools and sources of keywords many of which are free and in a future article I will give you and over view of them and their use. But before getting into these tools, and to avoid getting blinded by them, you must start by doing some homework and a build your potential keyword list.

In order to start building this list you must look at your industry from your target customer's perspective. An analysis of blogs and forums and how-to sites pertinent to your industry, is a good place to start. Your top competitors meta tags and page titles in SERP's is also an excellent source of potential keywords. Your friends and colleges are also a good source.

Once you have an extensive list of pertinent, potential keywords you will turn to keyword analysis like "Good Keywords", Yahoo! and Google's Adwords keyword analysis tool and your browser, all of which are free. There are many other more complete tools available that will automate most of this process, but for starters these are all you will require and will give you a good over view or their traffic potential considering your content, page rank and competition.