It Pays to Research Keywords

A highly important part of building a customized business blog is the researching of keywords and phrases that enhance the client's blog and website.  When possible, we  incorporate keywords into the blog's domain name.  It's wise to use keywords that target potential customers who are "late" in the buying cycle.  Long tail keyword phrases tend to be easier to rank than the general single keyword or double keyword phrases. And, people using these specific phrases tend to become buyers more often than people using general generic search terms.
Here is a typical path a customer takes on the way to a making a purchase.
1. Consumer becomes aware of a product.
2. Consumer seeks information about that product in preparation for possible purchase.
3. Consumer evaluates alternatives to product (features, pricing, etc...).
4. Consumer makes their purchase decision.
5. Consumer pulls out their credit card and completes the transaction.

6. Consumer then evaluates the product after buying it and decides if they want to keep or return it.
You can probably see that you want to target the consumer who is around step four...
Let's say your site sells guided mountain climbing tours in California. At first, you might consider targeting a generic phrase like travel. After all, an adventure tour is generally the type of excursion people like to participate in while traveling on vacation.  However, if you tried to go after that phrase, you'd be facing direct competition from big sites like Yahoo.com, CNN.com and Travelocity.com. It's unlikely you'd be able to knock any of those sites out of the top ten.
But, even more importantly, travel isn't the best phrase for you to target anyway. That's because many people who search using that phrase are looking for items such as plane tickets, ocean cruises or just doing very general research on where they might like to go. They're probably not saying to themselves...
"I'm looking for someone who sells guided tours for beginners to climb Mount Shasta so I can take my family on a fun trip this summer."
If they were, they'd be entering something other than travel.
Even if you were to target a more specific phrase like mountain climbing you'd still be up against heavy hitters like About.com, Wikipedia.org, and the USDA forest service. And, unless you sell everything related to mountain climbing for every mountain around the world, the traffic you'd get for that keyword isn't likely to convert to many sales.
So let's look at some of the keywords that are specific to what you're selling — keywords that you can start ranking for and generating traffic and sales right away.
Here are a few highly specific keyphrases that relate to customers who are much later in the buying cycle — at least at step three, probably at step four and possibly step five:
• california mountain climbing tours
• beginner mountain climbing in california
• guided mountain climbing tours
• mount shasta family climbing tours
Of course this suggests that you should be creating pages that zero in on snagging searchers who use long tail keywords. And, since there are potentially so many different long tail combinations that searchers may use to buy what you offer, that means you'll likely be creating more pages.  Google likes sites that have more pages. It makes the site look more substantial, more natural, and even more real.  Bear in mind that your "unique" pages need only be variants of your main offering(s) but focused on a specific long tail niche.
Therefore, each and every page will have a unique title, description meta tag, h1 header tag, and body content that emphasizes your offering by using the long tail keyword that you choose for each specific page. It isn't rocket science, but it sure does work well to snag consumers at the optimum stage of the buying process!
So, instead of focusing on just two or three highly competitive general keywords, target the dozens or even hundreds of easy-to-rank-for long tail keywords.
Also bear in mind, however, that the downside of focusing too much effort on the long tail is, if you target phrases which are too specific, you might not get enough traffic to sustain your business. That's why it's best to have:
• a few pages sending you large amounts of less targeted traffic, and
• a large number of pages with each sending you small amounts of highly targeted traffic.
But overall, it's best to think of it this way; would you rather rank for one keyword which sent you 1000 visitors a day or 200 keyphrases, half of which sent you 1 buyer a day?
After you do the math you'll see that 100 buyers are much better than 1000 site visitors who are only doing research.
In the end there is no substitute for doing your keyword research and determining which keywords have enough traffic to make them worth going after. And this effort must be dovetailed with doing your competitive intelligence research to determine which keywords you'll be able to rank for based on the sites you'd have to compete against.
Wordtracker is the hands-down best place to find a huge list of related keywords as well as learn how much traffic each is likely to provide your site. (excerpts from Wordtracker Academy)