When doing keyword research, I personally recommend starting quite broad. I do this for a couple reasons:

(1) It allows you to find keywords that you would have never come up otherwise
(2) It reveals the widest spectrum of keywords
(3) It is easier to think of broad keywords! :)

It may seem counter-productive at first because we are not looking for broad keywords, but broad searches will allow you to break apart just about any niche.

The first step is to open up the keyword tool that you use, I personally use Jaaxy for my keyword research, but you can use whatever tool you like. I suggest you do this so you can follow along with me here. Use the following link to open up the WA Keyword tool (included here at WA).

WA Keyword Tool

Now,the first thing you want to do is enter a broad keyword that is relevant to your niche. I am going to use an example niche that is something that I don't have any knowledge of to prove the power of working inward from a broad niche.

Starting Broad and Working Inward...

Again, I am using Jaaxy for this research so my screenshots are going to reflect this tool, but it does not matter what keyword research tool you are using. Let's start with the search term "parrots".

The next step is going to be to elaborate on this search, in other words digging deeper to find more relevant, long tail keywords. To do this, I have decide to dig the term "cheap parrot toys".

And just like that we have a list of several high traffic, low competition keywords in the "parrot toy(s)" niche. You can see the QSR (quoted search result) column which indicates how many competing pages there are in Google, the lower the number the better. I recommend aiming for terms under 400, and in an ideal world, you would be focusing more on terms under 300. These are typically very easy to get ranked under for SEO.

Some excellent terms here would be:

acrylic parrot toys, only 83 competing pages
cheap parrot toys, only 136 competing pages
discount parrot toys, only 54 competing pages
large parrot toys, only 266 competing pages

Now hypothetically, if I had a site dedicated to "parrots", I have quickly drummed up four search terms that I could get indexed in Google very easily with, either by creating a page on my website or writing an article and submitting it to StreetArticles.com.

But what about Traffic #'s?

People tend to look for keywords that get too much traffic. I know this sounds crazy, but let me explain...

Getting ranked on the first page of the Search Engines with keywords that get 50 searches per month is far better than getting ranked on the 3rd page of 10 keywords that get 10,000 searches per month. Why?

People usually don't make it past the first page of the search results, deeming a 3rd or 4th page ranking almost useless. You want to be on the first page and you do this by focusing on your competition, not by focusing on traffic numbers. Getting 10 pages indexed under 50 search/mth terms is still 500 potential clicks per month. That is a big deal. Remember, this is FREE traffic!