Image by Robert Scoble

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

For bloggers, search engine optimization (SEO) is a key part of getting your blog in a good search engine position and maximizing any revenue from the blog. That’s why doing keyword research is essential, both when you are choosing your domain name and when you are deciding on categories and key topics. To give an example, my site, Get Paid To Write Online, ranks No.1 in Google for that keyword phrase, and quite high for a couple of related ones. Even if you have an existing blog, it’s never too late to do some keyword research - and it doesn’t have to cost you a dime. Here are five keyword research tools you can use for free.

SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool

This tool has rapidly become my favorite keyword research tool. Powered by Wordtracker’s API, it offers related keywords and daily search volumes for the three main search engines. It also links to results from Keyword Discovery, Adwords Keyword Tool, Google Trends, Yahoo Suggest and other keyword tools. I see this one as a one stop shop and use it as my starting point for keyword research. After you have done a few searches you will have to answer a captcha question to continue searching.

Keyword Discovery

With Keyword Discovery, you have to enter a captcha when you begin a search and periodically after every few searches. Searching brings you a list of related terms, and you can click on those to enter a new search term. Although this is useful, now that the search volumes are included in the SEOBook keyword tool, there’s little need to use this, in my opinion. Keyword Discovery is a free part of a search engine marketing service from Trellian.

Adwords Keyword Tool

The same can’t be said for the Adwords Keyword Tool. As well as typing in keywords (plus a captcha), you can choose to generate keyword ideas from a URL (which is a great way to find out which keywords blogs in your niche are using). The tool also uses synonyms and generates a handy list of potential keywords. You can then sort by advertiser competition, search volume for the previous month and average search volume. I find this extremely useful for generating additional keywords for use in my content.

WordTracker Labs - Keyword Questions

Keyword Questions comes from WordTracker Labs. You can enter a word or short phrase and see what questions people are asking, ranked in order of search volume in the past 140 days. One of the questions that came up in a search for ‘writing’ was why is a raven like a writing desk?’ This is a good way to generate post ideas - answering the questions will be useful to the searchers. This tool does not work with long keyword phrases, which can be a limitation.

SEM Rush

SEM Rush is more of a competitive research tool, but it can be instructive to see the profile of other bloggers in your niche. The free version gives you access to the top ten organic keywords, gives a traffic estimate (it was wrong for my site), and suggests potential ad buyers (which is great if you are thinking about monetization). I found it quite instructive, and I will be checking out some of the potential advertisers it suggested. Prices for the full version start at $19.95 for a month, with the enterprise version priced at $499.95 per month. That version includes other tools which may be invaluable to business bloggers.

With all these free keyword research tools available, there’s sure to be one that works well for you. If you are using keyword research tools, which is your favorite and why?

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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