Your search marketing efforts start with finding the right keywords to target, if you don't target the right keywords the rest of your search marketing will be a complete waste of time. The most common mistake people make is to target keywords which are far to competitive so I am going to show you exactly how you can find long tail or low competition keywords.

There are several keyword research tools which make it easier to build your keyword lists my favorite is http://www.wealthontap.com/go/nichebot.php however to start off with you can get by perfectly doing the your research manually.

You first step is to start at the very top of your market and dig your way down. Think of a few main keywords which you think would get large amounts of traffic and go along to http://www.google.com/trends

Here is a comparison of the three main keywords in the work from home market. The more traffic a main keyword gets the greater the number of long tail keywords is likely to be found drilling down into that market.

As you can see the keyword "home business" and "work from home" have a similar number of searches. So I am going to pick the keyword "home Business" and dig a little deeper. To do this I am going to use the Google Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and simply enter "home business".

This will return a long list of keywords with the phrase "home business", sort them into highest traffic keywords first and going through the list click the add button to add them to your list. Save the list as a .csv file if you have excel or you can use Google spreadsheets http://docs.google.com. I have uploaded my keyword list here for you to view http://spreadsheets.google.com/home-business

You then want to do the search again with each one of those phrases to dig even deeper and create another list for each keyword. I am just going to pick one at random and I decided to look more at "start home business". So again I enter that into the Google Keyword tool.

Now I am into the real long tail keywords and amongst these I should be able to find some with very little competition. So again go through the list and click add next to the keywords you wish to add to your list and export the list. This time order the list highest search volume to lowest and ignore any keywords with very low search volume. Here is my list http://spreadsheets.google.com/start-home-business

Now it's time to check the competition so we can find out which of those keywords are going to easy to rank for and which aren't.

intitle:"easy to start home business" = 13
inanchor:"easy to start home business" = 2
intitle:"easy to start home business" inanchor:"easy to start home business" = 0 results

Keyword Elite http://www.wealthontap.com/go/keyword-elite.php is the only tool I know of which can obtain this data for you automatically.