To begin using the Find Keywords tool, first type three words that describe your product or service. You can generate a more finely tuned list of keywords by using the other tool options. If you want Yahoo to pull keywords from a particular URL, type it into the appropriate text box. This can save you some time.

For example, say you have a page on your web site devoted to a particular type of product. If it is well-written, it should naturally contain lots of keywords related to the product. If you supply the URL to that page, you can automatically create a list of keywords for your paid search campaign based on the content of that page.

If you want to search for keywords that contain or do not contain a certain word, type it into the appropriate text box. For example, if you do not want your ads displaying for searches specifically related to a competing brand, you can type that brand name into the “must not appear” box to filter out search terms that include it.

When all the appropriate text boxes are set, click Get Keywords. Yahoo will return a list of suggested keywords, with a small bar chart indicating the number of searches for each keyword. The traffic numbers are relative, so you really don’t know with any kind of specificity how many searches there are for each keyword. But you can see which ones generate the most traffic relative to the others in the batch of keywords.

To generate even more keywords, click the Refine this List button. On the popup that appears, you can choose to include or reject any of the keywords for purposes of creating a new keyword list. You can continue this process until you are satisfied with your keywords.

Finally, click the check boxes next to the keywords you want to add to the ad group.