Keyword Research Tools: My Ultimate List

Keyword research tools are essential for anyone who has an internet or online business. If you compare it to the offline world, keywords are like your ads in the Yellow Pages. It's what people will use to find your website or business. If you have good rankings in the search engines for the keywords that describe your webpages, you will get more traffic. You want to convert that traffic into a sale, a lead, a click or whatever your end goal is but it all has to start with traffic.

There are many ways to do keyword research. You can perform keyword searches manually or you can do it with a keyword tool that will go and retrieve a ton of related keywords once you type in the primary keyword. From those results, you can build your own keyword database of terms that you would like to target for your website. That's what I'm talking about when I'm referring to keyword research tools.

With thousands if not millions of pages added to the Internet daily, getting your website ranked in the search engines is proving to be more difficult. This is the essence of search engine optimization (SEO). Many webmaster choose to target the so-called "long tail" keywords as they still have a few searches but relatively few results being displayed in the search engines.

This means that your chances of getting a good ranking is much better. For example, it's going to be practically impossible to get on the first page of Google for terms like "refinance mortgage" or "dental insurance" but you'll have better luck with "refinance mortgage with poor credit" or "dental insurance for small business owners". Well, you get the idea.

The main advantage of using keyword research tools vs. doing it manually, is that you can save a lot of time. If you're on a tight budget, there are some free tools available such as the one from Digital Point which pulls data from the classic Overture keyword tool and the free version of Wordtracker.

Here are some keyword tools that I have used (in no particular order of preference):

1. WordTracker

2. NicheBot

3. KeywordElite

4. Keywords Analyzer

What are some other programs or services that you have use and would like to recommend?