Keywords are search queries visitors use on search engines. Keywords are one to six words in length, with a few longer exceptions. You know your site needs keywords, but which ones? How do you research keywords? Keep reading; that’s the topic of this article.You cannot have a successful search engine optimization campaign without keyword research. Your website must show in search results for key phrases that indicate interest in your products/services and deliver some kind of benefit to the company (sign ups, purchases, downloads, etc), so it’s important to find and test keyword phrases.

This article will teach you basic keyword research strategies and introduce you to more advanced local tactics.

Where Can I Find Keywords?

There are special tools on the web that help markers find keywords, called keyword research tools. There are free, subscription-based and pay-per-use tools. In this article I focus on the free ones.

Disclaimer: Subscription and pay-per-use tools are not always better than free ones. Search for reviews and feedback before spending bucks with any company. There are many bad products aimed at “newbies” and their curious wallets.

Free Keyword Research Tools

Google Keyword Tool - Search for keywords in over 50 languages. It features a very high quality, clean and frequently updated keyword database, with estimated search volume. The down side – keywords that don’t meet Google’s search volume criteria don’t make it to the database, rendering this tool useless for long keyword phrases (four to eight words in length). Regardless, this is one of the best keyword research tools.

Wordtracker – Their free tool has a limit of 100 results. If you want to see all keywords, you must pay. Its free database is very detailed, so in most cases 100 results is enough. Wordtracker gathers keyword data from two meta search engines - Dogpile and Metacrawler. Both search engines hold around a one percent market share, so to estimate real search volume numbers across all search engines you must multiply Wordtracker numbers by 99.

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