I have been involved with Search engine optimization now for several years and there is one thing that is foundational when you are looking to engage in SEO.

That one thing is excellent market research.

The internet is driven by content. Content is found by people typically doing search queries in Google, Youtube, Yahoo, Ask and other smaller search engines.

Upon doing their search, they are presented with the results that the search engine presents. Over the years the search engines have gotten much better at bring to the forefront the right search results in which people are looking for.

This is good and bad.

It is good for searchers as they are finding what they need quicker than ever before.

It is bad for those competing, because rarely will a searcher need to go beyond the first page to find what they are looking for.

This is why choosing the right keywords is so critical to your content development plan for getting on the first page of Google.

Pick the wrong words and you will be scratching your head after a ton of work and find yourself and your company no better off.

So let's look at a couple of free keyword tools and a basic approach to finding the right keywords.

The first keyword tool we will look at is the free wordtracker keyword tool. I really love this tool for finding long tail keywords that other tools do notshow very well.

Once you get there, you can enter in a keyword and click on Hit me.

Once you do that, you will be give the top 100 words based on wordtrackers database.

When looking at the keyword "Free SEO" … I am given about 600 potential searches of various phrases daily.

When presented with the choices at Free Wordtracker, you are looking at estimated daily searches. Although I do not put alot of weight into the numbers at this time, I do make a note of it.

When looking for ways to rank, you will need to look at a couple other factors before taking a closer look at the numbers with another tool or 2.

There are 2 leading indicators as an seo expert I am going to want to look at. One is the Search engine competition based on phrase match and the other is what is called all in title. The all in title is the first component Google reads when they are crawling a page. You can completely control the title of the page and as a basic guideline you should be aiming for 1 keyword per page, and use that keyword in the title of your content.

So let's look at some of the above phrases and what to do with them to determine if we will be able to rank on some of these phrases.

When breaking down keyword competition, there are 2 leading indicators I am looking for.

So after looking at several, I have found that the competition and all in title are very competitive for many of the keywords…which I expected. However, in cross referencing with the free google keyword external tool, I discovered a few keywords that had decent traffic and low competition that is directly related to my market.

When looking at this term, free seo report and free seo reports, I found that I could target these terms and gain this traffic relatively easy. This gives me 2 very targeted keywords in which I can attract people to the site, and I know i will not be wasting time going after a keyword that is too competitive.