Free Keyword Research Tools

Researching keywords has got to be one of the most intimidating, and time consuming, processes involved with internet marketing today. Unless a person or company has a very generous advertising budget, the only way to get a site seen by lots of organic traffic is to optimize for specific words or phrases, and then hope to get ranked high enough in the search engines for them.

Part of the idea behind getting free traffic to your website is not to spend too much money on the tools to get that traffic. There are quite a few keyword research sites and tools available for a price. Fortunately, most of the top priced companies also offer introductory, or free versions of their programs. Below is a growing list of free tools available for keyword research. Know about a free keyword research tool and don't see it listed? Leave a comment below.

• Wordtracker - probably one of the better known. Paid services can be expensive, but most web owners starting out may want to try out their free keyword suggestion tool.
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool - It makes sense to use the most powerful search engine today to do your keyword research. Google offers a multitude of free resources for the web owner - their free and very thorough tool will give you all kinds of keyword ideas.
• The Dowser - This company has many keyword and SEO research tools available for a price. They also offer a powerful desktop keyword research tool for free which helps you generate thousands of keywords and manage them from your pc.
• Keyword Discovery - considered by many to be the best alternative to the now defunct Overture search tool, you can use their free search term suggestion program online.
• Nichebot - Nichebot offers extensive tools in their paid service, but you can get some basic keyword research done through their free Nichebot Classic keyword tool.
• SEO Book - offers a keyword suggestion tool that pulls data in from the Wordtracker database. Nice, easy interface.
• Webmaster Toolkit - This is a free online keyword suggestion program that will pull results based on your search engine selection such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, and others.
• Keyword Tumbler - A downloadable keyword research marketing tool that will take your keywords or phrases and give you a ton of variations with addon words, thereby giving you thousands of new keyphrases built around one theme.

Targeted Traffic

Once their websites are published online, the serious web owner starts looking at how to get more traffic to their site. Knowing that increased visitors can potentially bring more profits, thier search for the holy grail of traffic generation leaves the online entrepreneur vulnerable to many of the traffic scams and schemes that are on every corner of the Internet.

Lofty promises of easy, high volume traffic and massive profits often suck in even the most savvy of business persons because they want to believe the promises made by these traffic hawkers. It has been proven many times over that high volume will not necessarily translate into a high sales rate.

Visitors who come to your site through exit traffic, safe list memberships, or redirected from expired domains are not truly filtered for the particular product or service that you are offering, which more often than not results in them clicking off your site seconds after they have arrived. Quality traffic comes from people clicking links on topics targeted to what they are interested in and then being a directed to a website containing information they want and expect as a result of clicking that link. The bottom line is that the best and most dependable sources of targeted traffic come from links that people click.

To determine just how targeted your visitors are, you will need to track their activities from entry to the end result, whether it be a signup to your list, a purchase, or exiting. Being able to determine which clicks actually result in sales is vital. To track conversions from click to sales, and depending on the type of shopping cart software you are using, you can create a custom order confirmation page - i.e. the page that is displayed once the transaction is complete. This is very easy to do if you're using a payment processing service such as Google Checkout, Paypal, or any of the other third party payment processors.

Pay attention to the type of user demographic you are trying to target. Each search engine and web site has a particular type of user (age, interests etc.), and they will have different triggers that lead them to purchasing or completing a desire action. All of these things are important for you to know so that your advertising dollars will be spent in the most advantageous places.