SEO tools are tools that help you with researching and analyzing various factors that help with optimizing your website for both search engines and visitors. These tools reduce your time and provide you a lot of valuable data.

SEO tools are fast becoming the most sought after, there are tools that help you with your keyword strategy, competition analysis, link analysis, all of these help in SEO ranking. In this post I will go over in detail about the SEO keyword research tools that are very popular and these tools are available for free!

Keyword Research tools :

Wordtracker – Go to: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
Type in the keyword for which you need keyword suggestion and click on “hit me”. You will get a lot of suggestions for your given keyword. Wordtracker will also give you the number of searches for each keyword.

KeywordDiscovery  – Go to:http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html. 
Enter the image code provided, type in the keyword in the field provided and hit “search”. You will get a list of related keywords.

Wordstream– Go to this url – http://www.wordstream.com/keyword-suggestion-tool
On the left panel you will find the free keyword tool. Type in the keyword for which you are looking for suggestions and click on the “Get suggestions now” button. The page displays keywords related to your search term. Against each keyword you can see the relative frequency. This is Wordstream’s estimate of how often a particular keyword is searched on. A higher relative volume means the keyword is searched on more often.

Google Adwords-The url that you need to go to is,  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal,  type in the  keyword or your website url or both and hit the “search” button.  You will get related keywords against which the volume of competition, global monthly searches, local monthly searches, and local search trends are presented. Clicking on the magnifying glass against each keyword will give you trend for that keyword. The google trends page provides you the regional interest, the top searches and the rising searches.

I have covered some of the popular keyword research tools here, you can go through some more keyword research tools that are available. After completing your research , you will have an exhaustive list of relavant keywords, you can now zero down to the ones that are most searched for and most relvant for your business. I would suggest that you also include long tailed keywords as well, while the search engines might not show a high count against these keywords, there are people who do search for these keywords, and you do not want to miss out on those opportunities.

While all of these keyword research tools are very helpful, they are not always exact.

The keywords suggested through these tools may or may not result in an increase in traffic but they are most certainly worth a try.

I will take up other SEO tools in my next post.