Your own web site

The most important keyword research tool at your disposal is your own web site, http://www.yourDrupalsite.com/. If you already have some traffic, chances are that they're coming from somewhere. With analytics installed, you should be able to find out what they're searching on with just a few clicks. If you have Google Analytics installed then you can easily see this data by logging in to its admin section and then going to Traffic Sources | Search Engines | Google.

This information can be invaluable if you cross-reference it with your current positions in the search engines. Say, for example, that you're getting 100 searchers a month on a term that you're on page 2 of Google. That's a good indicator that people are searching hard to find a company like yours and that may be a very good term to focus on with your search engine campaign. If you're getting that much traffic on page 2, imagine if you were in the top three on page 1.

Drupal has a built-in search engine—another great tool to see what the people are searching for, after they've already visited your site. There's an insanely useful module for that, called Top Searches (http://drupal.org/project/top_searches) that does a better job that Drupal's built-in list. This module was developed by the founder of Linnovate, Zohar Stolar. Thanks, Zohar!

Your competition

How your SEO-savvy competitors market themselves can reveal a lot to you about where your customers are. If they've optimized, you can easily see what terms they consider important, just by visiting their web site.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Visit https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to check the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool shows how many people searched for a particular keyword and related keywords in the last month or so. At its most basic, you type in the keyword you're interested in and it gives you the quantity of searches for that keyword and derivatives of that keyword.

Why would Google just give this information away? Google makes their money when businesses buy ads. In the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, they've created an excellent resource to help advertisers find highly trafficked keywords for their campaigns. Luckily, this tool is free, even if you aren't going to advertise.

Apart from being free, there are several advantages to Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

It is Google's own data, so you can count on it being accurate for 60-70% of search engine users. If you're focused on Google, this is the tool to use. Period!

It gives you an exhaustive list of terms. If you type in your main term, it will often produce hundreds of additional, related terms for you to consider. Some other free tools will only give you ten at a time which makes research a very time-intensive process.

It allows you to filter results using negative keywords. So, if you sell software, you might use the negative keywords -free, -crack, -serial to filter out all the people who are looking for free, cracked, or just want a serial number. That will make a huge difference to the resulting volume count.

Other helpful things include the ability to download the resulting list as a CSV, using your web site (or even a competitor's web site) to start the keyword search, and the ability to match the results based on broad, phrase, or exact.

Google Zeitgeist

Visit http://www.google.com/zeitgeist to check out the Google Zeitgeist web site.

Zeitgeist is German for time ghost or the spirit of our times. The idea that there are certain thoughts or ideas that make their way through society. Google Zeitgeist shows you emerging trends by showing the fastest rising search phrases in a given time period in each of four major services: search, news, images, and book search. You can also see things like Top of Mind, Politics, and Trendsetters.

For example, the 2008 USA Year-End Google Zeitgeist shows that the fastest growing terms in search are obama, facebook, att, and iphone. So, how does this help you with keywords research? It can help you to take advantage of trends in your markets. If you can somehow tie your products to the major trends, then you can take advantage of huge amounts of traffic.

Google Trends

Visit http://www.google.com/trends to check out the Google Trends web site.

Google Trends allows you to see how a keyword has done over the years. For example, remember that kid who sang the Numa Numa song on YouTube? Well, his popularity is waning (finally!). Check it out:

Google Trends even lets you compare two different words to see which one has more traffic. With some comparisons, it even charts major news stories to drops or peaks in traffic:

SEOmoz

Visit http://budurl.com/seom to check out the SEOmoz web site.

SEOmoz offers a suite of free and paid Pro tools to help your optimization efforts. For example, their Term Extractor tool will tell you what keywords your competition is optimizing for. When I put in Amazon.com, I got gems such as books and gift cards. No surprises there. Other great tools include:

They seem to add new tools every month. At $79 per month, this is not cheap. Try it at least once and decide for yourself if the Pro membership is worth it. I'm a paying subscriber.

Keyword Discovery

Visit http://budurl.com/KeywordDiscovery to check out the Keyword Discovery web site.

Suppose you want to know what's going on outside of Google—non-Google searches do make up 30-40% of the market. And, say you want to see monthly trends for your keywords and create campaigns that you can come back to and revise over time. Well, pry open your wallet and head on over to Keyword Discovery. Their free tool just isn't as good as Google's, however, for a reasonable monthly fee you get an excellent keyword research tool.

The best thing about Keyword Discovery is that you have an account that you can log in to and save your research. This is great if you are running several campaigns across different sites or you just don't have time to do all your research in one fell swoop. Also, their related terms finder is second to none—even better than Google's in some cases. They show data from all over the Web too by capturing data from many sources, including ISPs and search logs from large web sites (they don't reveal which ones, though). A worthy research tool in your kit.

WordTracker

Visit http://budurl.com/WordTrackerFreeTrial to check out the WordTracker web site.

WordTracker has been around the longest for good reason. They provide dozens of tools to help you find the best keywords. They gather their data from Meta search engines—search engines that aggregate search results from many different search engines. They then extrapolate the number of searches on a particular term based on market share data. It's not perfect but it does provide some great data points.

One of the most helpful features is the step-by-step wizards which walk you through your keyword research. If you're new to keyword research, this feature alone is worth the membership fee. The price is quite reasonable when you consider that you can get a fully-functioning seven day trial for free! If you're just doing one web site, sign up for the trial, get your research done, and cancel it. I like free.