Since I put up the videos on Article Marketing, I’ve had a fair amount of questions around keyword research. And by far the most asked question is what is the best keyword research tool? Which I guess goes to show that at least the message about the importance of doing your keyword research is being noted.
As to whether or not there is one tool that is better than another, it really comes down to what you are wanting from your keyword research. Have you already decided your niche and are looking for keywords to help you rank better in the search engines? Or are you going to be selling a product and want the best keywords to use for your PPC campaign? Maybe you’re wanting to earn money from Adsense?
See, keyword research covers a whole lot of ground and you need to know up front what it is you want in order to get the best performing keywords for it. Is there such a thing as the ultimate keyword research tool that does it, uncovering every last one of Google’s secrets, regardless of where you want to use them? Personally, I don’t think so. Not even my fabulous Market Samurai does everything I would love for it to do. But then, it’s not meant to be just for keyword research.
In fact, that’s the trouble with most of the keyword tools out there. They’ve evolved into being more than just a keyword research tool. Now we not only want them to find the best keywords, but we also want to know how much those keywords are worth in terms of SEO value, or Adsense value. We want our keyword tool to tell us how hard the competition is, find relevant content, discover high ranking PR sites that we can use for backlinking, check out how much we’ll have to pay for a PPC campaign… the list just goes on.
Oh, and of course we want all it done on autopilot within a matter of seconds, if you please. 
If you’re looking for keywords that will get you ranked higher in the search engines, then you need to find those that are going to be relatively easy to rank for. Check out the competition. If the first few sites have your chosen keyword in the title, look at their PR, see how many backlinks they have. Don’t waste your time going after keywords if the top sites already have a high PR with a zillion websites linking back to them. Unless of course, you want to spend the next few years trying to catch them up.
Quite frankly, the best keyword research tool is right between your ears. Sure, go ahead and find ways to automate it. But keyword research is the most important aspect of doing your business online and if you’re not prepared to put in a little bit of work upfront on finding the right keywords for whichever aspect of your business you’re working on, then you won’t have much success regardless of which keyword research tool you opt to use.
My Ultimate Keyword Research and SEO Tool is Market Samurai. It is simply awesome!
Hey, Johan, I agree. MS is an awesome piece of software. But it’s still only as good as you make it.
Btw, changed your comment to show your name, not your keyword. But checked out your site and you’ve got some pretty cool Google info on there. Great job.