Keyword Research
In the beginning was the Keyword.
Keyword research is the first thing you start thinking about when considering traffic from search engines. You don't? Well, you should. Keyword research must precede any serious search engine optimization work. This fact becomes obvious when you enter in: you can't take the first keyword that appears to you in connection with your business, and optimize the Web pages accordingly. Imagine for a moment that you want to start selling Web hosting services, and optimize your pages for "Web hosting service" or just "Web hosting", without any prior keyword research. You will hardly receive any traffic from the search engines, taking into consideration that the competition for this keyword is huge and your new page has no chance to appear among the top 30. After you learn this lesson, you'll probably want to re-optimize your site for a less competitive keyword like "MyBestCompany Web Hosting", where "MyBestCompany" refers to your company name and the competition is now dead because no one else has yet had a chance to include your company name into their website (and, moreover - in title). Again, you receive no traffic: since your business is new to the Web, no one has ever heard of it and no one types your company name in the search engines to find you, except probably yourself, your friends, family and colleagues who are curious because yesterday you told them you've just opened.
Failing to mark which keywords will bring good quantity of targeted visitors may definitely have far-reaching effect on your business. Having learned that lesson, you are on the right track now - looking for a decent keyword research software that will tell you which terms are both fairly competitive and often used by your prospects to find the goods or services they need.