In Internet Marketing, one of the most common tasks that we all perform is Keyword Research. There are a whole host of tools available to help you with this (such as the excellent Keyword Elite) but for those operating on a budget, these tools can appear expensive!
This article will arm you with 7 great keyword research tools that you can access for free to help you to build your online business to a point where the professional tools are within your reach.
1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool – This should be your first port of call for keyword research. Think about it, who knows more about search volume on Google than Google themselves? The great thing about this tool is that not only does it suggest synonyms to expand your list of potential keywords, it also lets you download the results into a spreadsheet. I always start out here then update the spreadsheet as I go.
2. Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool – Another great tool that you’ve probably come across already! The full subscription to Wordtracker is worth every penny that they charge, but when starting out, the free version is great for finding related keywords.
3. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool – This is one of my favorites – despite owning some professional tools! The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool effectively gives you everything that you’d get from the AdWords tool and from Wordtracker (plus more) all combined in one easy to use page. The only reason to use the other tools is that I find them a little quicker, plus only Google has access to “actual” search data…!
4. KwMap.com – I already wrote a post on this yesterday as I was so impressed with this new tool! It performs in a similar manner to the Wordtracker free keyword tool, but presents the related terms visually along two differing threads. This allows you to see two sets of related terms which slowly converge in their meanings. To be honest, it’s hard to describe – check it out to see what great potential it has!
5. SpyFu – Want to know how your biggest competitors are getting ranked well in the search engines? SpyFu can help you! OK, to be fair, you still need to do the work, but it can give you great insight. And that’s just the free version….! 
6. Quantcast – Using Quantcast is like having Google analytics on your competitors domains! It gives you the ability to dig into not only their traffic, but also their demographics, giving you an indication if the traffic that you’re going after fits the profile that you’re looking for. For example, if you have a product that will sell well to young professionals and your research indicates that for your chosen keywords your main competitors are getting traffic from mainly over 50’s, then I would suggest that you need new keywords!
7. SEO Chat PageRank Search – SEO Chat has a whole goodie bag of free SEO related tools and I’d recommend you spend some time exploring them. For keyword research, you can use their excellent PageRank Search to get an idea of the strength of your competition for your chosen keywords. (Note that SEO Book mentioned above offers a great add-in for Firefox called SEO for Firefox that offers the same, plus much more, but is ONLY for Firefox, which is why it’s not one of my top 7!)
This list is not meant to be exhaustive, just to get you started. If you’re serious about SEO, I would recommend that you read The SEO Mindset by Brad Callen which is one of the best, most comprehensive introductions that I’ve come across.
Enjoy! 
I’ve just come across an interesting new tool for Keyword Research that presents everything in a cool visual display. Hop on over to KwMap and try it out for yourself and I’m sure you’ll agree that it has great potential.
In essence, when you query on a specific keyword, it returns a visual display of the keyword with two strands of related keywords associated with it. You can navigate through these related keywords to follow the relations and identify some interesting phrases that you might otherwise never have thought of.
It’s early days in terms of predicting whether or not this will take off, but I for one will certainly be including it in my keyword research sessions!
Over the last 12 months, I’ve been focusing more and more of my effort on understanding SEO. Much of what I learned came from people who have figured things out over a period of many years by trial and error. Well, now Google have released their own Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide which thankfully confirms much of what I’d learned! What’s interesting though, is that whilst I can provide you with a link directly to the PDF itself (which I have above) I can find no reference to it on any of the regular Google pages! What I did find though, is phenomenal…..
Sitemaps have been around on the Internet for quite many years. Those new to the Web may only have come across the XML sitemaps made popular by the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. However, a different form of sitemap pre-dates these modern examples by many years.
When the Web first started to become mainstream, we didn’t have all the sophisticated navigation tools that Web designers today take for granted. Websites were typically much simpler than today and it was often difficult for visitors to gain a clear understanding of how a site was structured. On top of this was the lack of search functionality within the majority of sites, making it harder for people to get to the information that they were looking for.
To address these challenges, sitemaps were created. Read more…
Yesterday, I put the finishing touches to a new Squidoo lens focusing on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In particular, I’ve reviewed what I believ to be the top 3 products in this area.
Why not take a quick look at http://www.squidoo.com/get-found-seo or have a look at the short intro video that I posted on YouTube: