Like i said in previous hubs, keywords are of crucial importance, and learning how to search keywords the right way is one of the best and most effective way to improve your marketing revenue. Having said that, and moving on to what really matters, this hub is going to try a more hands on approach on what tools to use, and how to use them in your benefit. It is easy to say "this a great and usefull tool for your needs", and another is really taking the time to explain how to do it properly.

Keep in mind that all of the values given here are just personal limits that just seem right to me, you and others can find that i am beeing to conservative or too tight on some of them. It is just my point of view, not an undeniable truth, so once again feel free to add information on that matter.

We can classify keywords in a large number of groups, but the only ones that have relevance while choosing them are the following:

• Popular Keywords
  
• Expensive Keywords

These two groups are connected, as expensive keywords are generally popular ones, but popular are not always expensive. Now if I am going to write a hub or article i will go for the popular and expensive keywords, because i will not advertise my hub and plan to make money on just showing the ads, on the other hand, if you want to promote something that you will advertise, and want to get the most cost effective traffic, you should go for the popular keywords but not expensive, that way you generate some traffic at a relatively low cost.

Now the next challenge is finding a keyword in the selected group that has small competition, this is the last stage in selecting the right one, and a rather disappointing one, because a lot of times we have a great keyword that just has too much competition, and we need to start over from scratch.

In paper this does look plain and simple, but if you are reading this, you already know that it is not, and there is a lot of work to be done just to get to the perfect keyword. Having said this i will now talk about some useful tools that will help you on learning how to search keywords the proper way.

If you are having trouble just finding a topic to choose a keyword from, this tool is the starting point for you. It is another service by google (thnx) that shows a list of the current fast-rising search topics in the US.

It's a perfect tool, because it shows you 100 fresh searches on topics that are rising in popularity, so you can pick one that you identify with and use it as a base for your keyword(s). You can also use the google trends search engine, that basically shows information on a subject, and its traffic variation over time, as well as a geographical placement, providing you useful information on how popular it has been and how it is holding it.

Google Trends Website

Once you have your keyword topic, now you need a proper keyword, this tool can help with that, by providing a list of 100 keywords related to your, and the estimate monthly search numbers.

On a personal note, do not trust 100% on all the results you will see there, every other time you will see a long tail keyword with a glorious search number, that just sounds too good to be true, and probably is. This happens because theses numbers are an estimate, based on wordtracker's own database (based on data from metacrawler and dogpiler), and scaled to replicate the big search engines numbers.

So when you find some keywords that you like, note them down, because they will have to go trough some other tests before we can use them.

WordTracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Apart from this tool, wordtracker labs also have another tool, but this is for questions related with your keyword, can also be very usefull depending on how are you writing your articles

Keyword Questions - Keyword Research Tool

Another nice tool from google, this one looks sorta like a tag cloud, but a cloud that is constantly expanding as you click on each keyword. You can use this to find popular related keywords to any topic, so it shares the same function as wordtracker's keyword tool, not so complete as the previous, but still a good source.

It only works with English versions of google, if you are (like me) from another country other than US/UK, you have to set the default to the English version, otherwise you will not be able to select the tool. Just perform any search like you would normally do, and then on the upper right corner, just below the search box, you will see the option "+ show options", then you can select on the "standard view" the wonderwheel, and you are set to go, just navigate trough keywords, and you will see results related to them being show on the right of the screen.

Once again don't forget to take note of the keywords you think are promissing at this moment, so we can analyse them later on.

Google WonderWheel (example using hubpages)

This is my latest finding in keyword tools, and by far the most complete one, once again your friendly google outdid itself. This is another keyword analysis / suggestion tool but this time we have it all in the same screen:

• Traffic volume
• Geographic displacement
• Related Keywords
• Comparison between keywords
• News about selected keywords
  

You have all this packed in the same page, a great time saver; also if you log into your google account it will also show you actual numbers, which is good for comparison. After understanding how this works, and trying out your possible keywords, add the best ones to your list, so we can analyse further on to the last stages.

Google Insights for Search

Now that we have a list of possible keywords, we must find out if they have a lot competition or not, and for that we can use a keyword tool supplied by google AdWords.

Just type your keywords in the box, and after some seconds processing the request, you will be presented with two grids, the first will have your keywords, the second will have related keywords to your own. In either of these grids will see a lot of info, but for us, and at the moment we will only care about Advertiser Competition and Local Search Volume.

If some of your keywords have high or very high competition, just forget them, it would be too hard to get them to appear on the front page of search engines, keep those that have below average competition, this is generally a good rule, but the lower competition the better. Now that we narrowed down the list a bit, lets see how we stands traffic wise. Remove keywords that have Not enough data, this basically means no one is searching for them, so don't waste your time here also, look for anything above 500, the more the merrier, so you can secure enough traffic to generate income.

This tools works well as a last analyser, because it tells you what is worth it or not, so don't skip this one please, or you will be wasting your time.

Google AdWords - Keyword Tool

So there you have it, now you know how to search keywords the proper way, using all these tools of course. Bear in mind that there are a lot more tools out there, surely some better and worse than those i have showed you, what can i say is that these have worked for me, and will work for you, now that you know how to use them.

In the future i will write another hub on plug ins (FireFox) that ease the burden a bit more on finding the right keyword for you business, so stay tuned for that one also.

Don't forget to check out my other hubs, some are related to affiliate marketing because i use these tools mainly to provide keywords to promote Acme People Search, but you can expand its use to any niche or program.