Get a few people in a room and throw out some words.

That was the main suggestion from people talking about keyword research and keyword selection to drive Web traffic at the Interactive Local Media conference today.

Keyword research is the process of selecting keywords that are relevant to your site, or figuring out what people are putting into the search text box on Google. Liana Evans of KeyRelevance said although a business might validly want to be found under their business’ name on Google, it’s also important for that company to use keywords in search engine optimization to help customers that may not know the business name. It’s not good enough to just find “ABC Plumbers” when a person types in “ABC Plumbers” into the Google search engine; ABC Plumbers should also pop up when someone searches “plumbing Philadelphia” and “plumbers PA” and “plumbers Philly” and so on.

This is a relevant point for newspapers who are trying to get stories, special sections or any other part of the newspaper Web site to appear at the top of search engine results. Frequently, newspapers do this with headlines on their Web stories. A good Web headline on a news story, for example, would be “Boston City Council Votes on Property Taxes” instead of “City Council Votes on Taxes”. (For more on this practice, see the 2007 NAA report, “Smart Strategies: Online Marketing for Newspapers”. In addition, the report talks about newspapers and other media outlets purchasing keywords.)

Andrew Shotland of LocalSEOGuide.com echoed Evans’ suggestions on what he called “keyword expansion,” or brainstorming beyond the obvious keywords (i.e. business name + city). The thesaurus is your friend. Anchor tags and meta data are also your friend, so ask the Web department about implementing those more often.