Doing business online means that your primary goal is to get traffic to your website. There are many methods you can use to generate that steady stream of traffic: Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, and article marketing. All of these methods have one thing in common: you have to have a good list of keywords for them to work. That’s why many online marketers turn to Googles adwords suggestion keyword tool.

There are other programs online that will help you find great keywords, but most people stick with the giant and use the Google keyword tool. This tool will give you most of the information you’ll need to set up successful advertising campaigns online.

Of course, as with everything, the keyword tool is not the do all end all. It’s a really good place to start but you really have to drill down to find as many possible results as you can.

Most people will use this basic approach when doing their keyword research: type in a broad phrase and then take some of the results and drill those down even further.

Enter a general term and make note of the results. Depending on what you are using the keywords for, you may want to set the keyword tool to show you specific things such as the estimated cost per click, or the amount of competition, etc.

Once you’ve gotten a general list of possible keywords to target you can then get more specific in your search. For example, if you’re searching for dog toys you would enter ‘dog toys’ in the keyword tool. You will get back a fairly comprehensive list but you can than take those results and narrow them down further.

So if you got the term homemade dog toys you may be able to further hone that down to wooden home made dog toys. You get the idea. Start broad and narrow your selections down until you’ve got a complete list of highly targeted keywords to use for your online advertising campaigns.

The narrower you make your list the more targeted, and likely to actually make a purchase, your visitors will be. Also, you’ll have less competition for the term wooden homemade dog toys then you would for dog toys. True, you’ll also have fewer searches but the searchers you do have will be very targeted and they won’t cost you as much.

Don’t get too caught up the estimated cost per click numbers. These are only estimates. The actual amount you, or anyone else, pays for a given keyword can vary significantly based on several factors such as the quality score Google assigns to your ad.

The more clicks your ad gets the higher the quality score you’ll receive. If you have a high quality score your ad will show up higher in the results and you’ll pay less for the keyword.

The Adwords suggestion keyword tool is a great place to start your keyword research for any type of online advertising you need to do. Just don’t fall into the trap of believing that it’s going to give you every result for any given keyword and make sure to keep in mind that the results you get will largely be estimates and not exact numbers.