Here is another video that I did for work talking about choosing your keywords. Â The tool that I am using to show different amounts of traffic is the Adwords Keyword Tool which can be found here
It is what the industry uses when wanting to do keyword research and finding what people are searching for. Keep in mind though that the numbers that you see as the amount of searches is not going to be 100% accurate, but will help give you a good idea of what the range is in searches. Â So here is the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxO5yyama5A
Now, also keep in mind that there are a few different types of keywords that Google uses.  There are Broad, Exact, and Phrase.  The default you get for normal search results is going to be Broad.  This means that they keyword is going to be within the context of a search, so “apartments in Salt Lake City” is a broad search term where the keywords are close to each other. An Exact is “apartments Salt Lake City” so it is exactly how it’s typed. Then Phrase is “apartments that are within Salt Lake City area” so they keywords are withing the phrase of the search.  Most of the time I like to search for the Exact match so that I can get a good idea of what that specific keyword term is like. Others may have a different preference.
Also where I am showing the “competition” section, that is the competition that you are seeing for the Adwords. Â That isn’t always going to give you a good indication of how competitive that keyword is in the Organic search results, but can be worth considering as well. Â A good way of finding how competitive a term is is to look at the sites that are within that Organic search result. Is there a Wikipedia page, or some other more authoritative site? That can tell you it might be harder to rank, but is not impossible. Â If you can use a tool to see how many links or leading towards a site, such as “SEO Quake,” then you can get a better feel of what amount of links you need to get leading to your site.
Of course if you have any questions about anything that I’m talking about please let me know. I’d be happy to answer any questions that you have and help you know what would be best for your website!