If you want to improve your search engine rankings, then you need to put attention on keywords. Keywords are what lead search engine users to your site. Choosing the right keywords is really important. But how can you find the best keywords for your website? Well, there are few free tools you can use.

Take a piece of paper and write down all keywords that can relate to your business. Analyze carefully your business and think of any keywords that relate to your company or product. Ask your friends what keywords would they search for if they were looking for products like yours.

Try to avoid common words, you need to focus on specific keywords. Than more specific your keywords are than more chances you have that your potential customers will find you.

When you have your list of possible keywords, you can try to find out which of them are most popular and try to focus your search engine optimization on these keywords. There are some good tools you can use here.

Remember that people often misspell words, so you can include also some misspelled words.

The first one is the Google AdWords keyword sandbox at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox .
Submit your keywords and you’ll get a list of popular queries that include your keyword and also a list of similar keywords to consider.

The second tool is the Overture Keyword Selector Tool . This one shows you the related searches to your term and how many times that term was searched on last month.

The third tool is a free software, Good keywords for finding the best keywords for your web pages. It provides you with the following features: keyword suggestion, misspelled words, web page explorer, keyword phrase builder, site and link popularity, keyword organizer.

Once you have your keyword list, you can use the Overture View Bids Tool to find out what they’re worth to other advertisers. You can check here your list of most fruitful keywords. You may find out that you can pay very little money in pay-per-click advertising for some hot keywords related to your business.

Google AdWords also provides a similar service, but only to registered members. And Google doesn’t show you the highest bids. You can use their tool named Traffic Estimator and see the traffic estimates for different bid values.

There few other places where you can find lists of popular keywords:

http://buzz.yahoo.com/ – you can find here the most searched terms on yahoo.
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html – What people are searching for at Google.
http://50.lycos.com/ – The 50 most popular searches on Lycos.