It is not that webmasters are not consciously optimizing their pages for keyword phrases and search queries. They often do. The problem is that they are not using the right keyword combinations, the ones used by a majority of their potential visitors and customers.

If you were to search for a page on search engines and keywords, what query would you use? "Optimize keywords", "keyword ranking" or "keyword and marketing"? Or are your customers searching for "search engine keyword placement"?

It is hard to say isn't it? Your first guess is probably wrong. We do not think alike.

What you need is a tool that can tell you what keywords searchers are using when searching for a site like yours. You need a list putting the most frequently used keywords at the top.

Free keyword suggestion tools
Cunning webmasters have for a long time made use of one of the free keyword generators available. The pay-per-click search engines, i.e. search engine companies that sell text ads to various search portals, provide suggestion tools for their customers.

The most famous one is the GoTo/Overture suggestion tool. (You can find links to this one and others at the Panda Search Engine Optimization Gateway). And yes, they will give you a large number of alternative queries to the keyword or phrase you have entered into the search form.

The problem is that these tools are mostly used by webmasters and optimizers like yourself, not regular searchers. Hence the results are seriously skewed, and do not give a realistic picture of what really takes place out there in Cyberspace.

If you are just looking for alternative search queries to optimize your webpages for, however, they are OK. After all, webmasters are also human beings. If there are keyword combinations they haven't thought of, the queries are probably not worth considering for optimization.

CD-ROM keyword databases
The major search engines will not give you an ordered list of search engine keywords relevant to your topic, although some of them will tell you what are the most popular queries this month. This means that you will have to go elsewhere.

A company called SeachUtilites offer CD-ROMs containing databases of more than 20 million queries, and if you are skilled in querying databases, this could be the solution.

The data is gathered from the Search.com metasearch engine, a search site that is used by regular searchers.

Wordtracker
If you find analyzing databases yourself a bit daunting, you would probably like to visit Wordtracker instead.

Wordtracker is the most popular fee based keyword analyzer on the Web, and is used by amateurs and search engine optimization professionals alike. We use it a lot.

Like the CD-ROM data it is based on metasearch queries made by ordinary Web searchers, meaning that the keyword combinations found are much more reliable than the pay-per-click listings generated by the Overture suggestion tool.

The Wordtracker staff know that you should not always go for the most competitive keyword combinations. These are often ruled by big companies that can afford to spend a large amount of money on search engine marketing. It might be just as sensible to optimize for a less popular search term.

Alternatively, you may write several articles on your topic, each one of them optimized for a separate keyword phrase. Make them unique articles, though; do not use the same text exchanging keyword combinations! That is called spamming and is frowned upon by the search engines.

Wordtracker helps you find the balance between the total number of competing web pages for each search engine, and popularity of the search term. As a matter of fact, Wordtracker makes a point out of discovering frequently used keywords with little or no competition.

If you visit Wordtracker and use their free trial , you are asked to enter a term that describes your business or service.

Wordtracker will find you as many related keywords as possible
You'll find out whether people actually search for these keywords
You may e-mail, print or refine your selection
They tell you how many other people are competing for your keywords in Altavista
In the paid version you may test your query against 24 search engines all in all.

Finding popular keyword phrases with few competitors
Wordtracker will help you find related keywords, i.e. queries that does not necessarily contain one of the words of your first suggestion (including synonyms).

Then it will find the keywords that have very few competing web pages (according to Wordtracker one of the best keyword combinations for this very page would be "keyword marketing").

This list is calculated on the basis of Sumantra Roy's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). The KEI compares a 24 hour result (number of times a keyword has appeared in the Wordtracker database) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign.

The amount of time you spend using Wordtracker, determines the price.