Free Keyword Research Tools

There are essentially two useful and free keyword research tools:

1. www.wordtracker.com
2. adwords.google.com

Wordtracker is faster and easier to use but has less comprehensive or relevant results. Wordtracker has a free trial that runs analysis against all searches done on MSN on the previous day and only allows you to choose/compaure up to 30 terms at a time. The paid version of wordtracker comes up both with more related terms, as well as more comprehensive analysis compared to more search engines over a longer period of time. Currently you can use the free trial as many times as you would like.

To use Google Adwords, you need to pretend that you're considering the purchase of ads on Google's search engine results pages. As the pretext to signing up, you "need to find out" what words, relevant to "what you're selling/doing" people are searching on, how many people, and how much competition exists in the results.

In both tools, what you're essentially doing with keyword research are two things:

1. You're trying to define keywords that people who don't know that you exist and don't yet know that they need you are actually searching on; and
2. You ideally want to focus efforts on keywords that have the most potential for payoff.

#2 above usually comes around to the idea of identifying a niche market that has a reasonable number of searches, and a relatively low amount of competition (other sites showing up in search results). This lies your most develop-able opportunity. You can certainly compete on other terms, but consider the consequences when you face the challenge of a low number of searches or a high amount of competition.

Wordtracker assigns a ratio, called a KEI, or keyword effectiveness index, to each term that you select. As wordtracker puts it, "The higher the KEI, the more attractive the keyword may be."