Keyword research

[dad7more]

i am trying to figure out what would be good keywords to optimize for an orthodontist.

i looked up the keywords "his city + orthodontist" or " his city + braces" and the google adword tool tells me there are no monthly searches for those terms.

i am not sure what i can optimize for if no one is searching for the most obvious keywords.

[dsabouri]

Hi a couple things to think about:

1. What would you or your customer search to find your company?

2. Locate your strongest competitors and see what keywords they're targeting by reading the home page, seeing what meta keywords they've set, look at their page titles.. a few good places to start.

Hope this helps.

[emediaSEO]

If you aren't sure about a couple of keywords, I would recommend running a small Adwords campaign to test them out.  It is pretty easy to find $50 or $100 credits to start accounts with, and depending on how expensive the keywords are,that could be enough to make a decision.  You can run the ads for any of the keywords you are testing and see which one brings the most traffic (and the highest quality traffic).

[DougRoberts]

Another place to look is at the anchor text of the links pointing to your competitor's sites. Open Site Explorer's Anchor Text tag will give you that.