Keywords are very important for optimizing your website. If your pages are properly optimized, they can bring you much more targeted visitors from search engine result pages.

There are several ways to find keywords for your pages. One of the best and most popular is to use free keyword research tools.

Today i’m going to talk about online tools (free tools, browser extensions and free versions of paid services) and desktop software (free and paid with free trial period).

Keyword research tools cannot fetch real-time data about keywords for every search, so they cache information.

Here is my list of free keyword research tools that will help you to find appropriate words and phrases for your website.

Free online keyword research tools

1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Probably one of the best free keyword research tools for SEO available online is Google’s own keyword tool. Just enter one keyword or phrase per line to see related keywords. You can apply different filters like broad, exact or phrase match types. You can also select different languages and countries to search for keyword phrases.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool also has a feature to show keyword ideas and statistics for desktop and laptop devices and different types of mobile devices (WAP, mobile devices with full internet browsers).

In keyword ideas tab you will see columns like Keyword, Competition, Global Monthly Searches, Global Local Searches, Ad Share, Google Search Network, Search Share, Approximate CPC (cost-per-click bid), Local Search Trends graph and Extracted From Webpage. I suggest you to enable all available columns by checking on Columns button on the right hand side:

After you finish you can download search results in CSV format. I highly recommend to use Google Keyword Tool because it’s free tool from Google and it has all features that are needed for keyword research.

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Niche marketing is extremely useful way to surpass your competitors. There are a lot of different niche markets but it is very important to find the one that will offer you the most chance for success because most of them are not profitable enough.

If you are going to spend your time and money you need to figure out which niche to target. I’ll describe 4 most important factors for long-term success with niche marketing.

1. Motivation

If you are not interested in niche don’t even choose it because you will not be able to update your site on a regular basis during two or three years or longer without motivation.

Think about niche. Is it really interesting? Will chosen niche be profitable?

Sometimes it may look like you have a great motivation and you may feel like you can target any niche you want. Wait for a few days and see what will happen. If you are not that motivated and don’t even think about this niche - think about something else.

Finding right marketing niche always takes time. It’s much better to think and analyze before than wasting your time and money on niche that will not be profitable.

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SEO is constantly changing but some basic things are always the same. Here is my list of basic search optimization tips that always were effective for me.

1. Content is the most effective linkbuilding tool

Your posts should be interesting, useful and unique. You can get tons of quality backlinks from hundreds and thousands of sites absolutely for free only by writing posts. Otherwise your visitors will not subscribe to your RSS feed, Twitter or Facebook updates and they will never come back or even remember your site or blog. Writing useful texts takes a lot of time but it worth it.

2. Update your website on a regular basis

You can experiment with updating your blog and find which way works for you. For example I feel comfortable to write posts on my blogs about 2-3 times a week.

3. Write posts only when you are motivated

That’s my golden rule. I write blog posts only when a feel that motivation for doing that. If I don’t have motivation I don’t write anything. It’s much better to do something else - go for a walk, read websites or magazines, watch movie, listen to the music, etc.

4. Use relevant keyword in meta tags, title and first sentence of blog post

When writing a blog post always use relevant keywords in it’s first sentence and title. Also use it in meta tags such as title, description and keywords. That way your post will become relevant to your keywords and you’ll get better rankings in search engines.

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Todays guest at MikeShakin.com - Gerald Weber, president of Search Engine Marketing Group in Houston, TX. You can also follow him on Twitter - @the_gman. I appreciate that Gerald took time to answer my questions.

Gerald, please give our readers a bit of your professional background. How did you get into Search Engine Marketing?

I started out working for a local search marketing company doing sales. I was actually doing a pretty good job at selling SEO/SEM services to business owners, but the company I was working for kept changing the commision structure every time I started to hit the goals. In other words, they were trying to make sure I didn’t get too much money so they could keep their own wallets nice and fat. In December of 2005, I had enough of this treatment and decided to hang my own shingle and here we are today.This is the point I decided it was time to learn SEO

How many hours do you work daily and what are your daily tasks?

Well this varies really, but generally speaking, I try to keep my work day in the normal business hours range i.e. 9am to 5pm CST(about 8 hours). However, it’s certainly not uncommon that I find myself doing work at very odd hours. That’s the life of an entrepreneur, and I like it that way.

The way I keep myself on track is by making daily to do lists. I write out all of my tasks the day before, and then I just go through and check off each task as it’s completed. This keeps me focused and meeting my daily goals. Too many entrepreneurs overlook the importance of getting organized. Being disorganized can kill your business, no matter how good you are at what you do.

My daily tasks generally consist a large percentage of link building, Adwords management and communicating with my staff to ensure that other tasks are completed in a timely manner.

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