Not very long ago some really smart guy helped me to understand that not the link building is to most importan part when optimizing website, but the keyword research. The situation is very similar to a guy who holds a gun in his hands and keeps on shooting without any specified targets. I guess you don’t want to be this guy.

Let’s see what kind of tools are freely available in order to help us to select our targets!

I will start the list with the widely used Google tools.

• The AdWords Keyword Tool was developed therefore to easy the advertising clients to select the suitable expressions for their needs.
• Google has another tool which may help you estimate searching volume and this is called Google trends.

My main problem with the previously mentioned tools is the not numeric value. The situation is a bit different concerning Google Trends since some days ago a very nice guy shared a Youtube video which helps to exploit the information of the Google Trend charts.

Before I share my personal favourite I would like to list two tools both provide numeric searching volumes.

• The first one is the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker, where the numbers reflects daily search volumes.
• The other one is the Free Search Term Suggestion Tool by KeywordDiscovery.com. The numeric data next to the related keyphrase shows the number of times that each keyword or phrase has been searched for over the last 12 months.
  
  And now please let me introduce my personal favourite the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. I suppose that this tool provides the most accurate estimations concerning the three major search engines. Beside the monthly volumes you will see some other links, that you may find very useful. For instance at the right outside coloumn you will see the Quintura link. In my opinion that is a very powerful suggestion tool as well, since it shows the targetted keyphrases of the major competitors.

  Summarizing I would say you can’t live without keyword research at competetive markets, but you shouldn’t trust the information provided by the different tools blindly. Test them, test all of them, and check your log files periodically.

  If you also have a favourite tool or any thought let me know!

  Thank you,
  Bagi Zoltán