The importance of keywords is not easy to estimate, since they make the foundation of our sites. Thanks to keywords, search engines index our websites properly, and users are able to find them more easily. Therefore properly selecting keywords is the basic component in the process of search engine optimization.

Keyword research is a time-consuming process and at times can prove to be quite difficult. At this stage you will focus on the important aspect of literacy and the full list of keywords will contribute on the functionality and niche of your site.

Another important aspect of SEO is to define your target audience and study its needs. You can spend days and even months, carefully optimizing your site for search engines, but it will all be in vain if you do not specify from the very beginning what is your target and which kind of users you want on your site. Otherwise, even reaching high places in the SERP, you will not be able to monetize your traffic as you would have liked.

To make things a little bit easier for you, we selected 8 free keywords research tolls which will help you learn what you have to do in order to properly optimize your site.

1. Actual Keywords

The sources used in Actual Keywords are the same with thouse used by Wordtracker, but the filtering system is different and bans illegal and garbage keywords. More over this keyword tool can be integrated into webmasters accounts and company accounts.

2. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion tool

This service is remarkable in that it collects information from several sources: Wordtracker, Google, Yahoo, Bing.You can save all the results in an XML file.

3. Submit Express

This tool will help you find the average number of requests for certain keywords from Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.

4. Wordtracker

This is the most popular and beloved free service to search for keywords, even thought its database is not always up to date.

5. Google AdWords Keyword Tool

The tool from AdWords is as popular as Wordtracker. Sometimes some of the data obtained is in need of some refinement, but here you can always get the latest information.

6. Wordtracker Keywords

This is a service with a good user interface, based on data from WordTracker. You can save these results in XML, CSV, XLS or TXT format.

7. Spacky Keyword Tool

Another free tool for keyword research, which will help you estimate the approximate number of search queries according to Google, Yahoo and Bing.

8. NicheBot Keyword Tool

This tool is also based on data from wordtracker, but when you click on one or more keywords of the results it will show other possible methods to search for keywords.

These tools are just a few of the many other tools that will help you in your keyword research to optimize your sites. We recommend you to try them and see which one will help you better. With these tools you can find a greater volume of search traffic and improve your website monetization strategies.