Finding good keywords and phrases is an important area of web marketing, and finding the best words and phrases that help potential customers find you easily while not too competitive to even bother with…. well, is not easy.  Here are some tools to hep you find the right keywords and phrases:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool -  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The best free tool, which generates synonyms and variants of your suggested keywords.  You simply type in the words or phrases, which are relevant to your site’s content and it will return some helpful statistics related to them, such as how strong the competition is for those words and the approximate search volume for those words.  

They recommend that if competition is very strong for your chosen words, you try using longer phrases as you’re better of going for a number of the less competitive phrases than a very competitive single word.

Wordtracker - http://www.wordtracker.com

Probably the best known keyword suggestion tool to help you identify keywords which are most relevant to your business, and which web surfers are most likely to type into search engines.  The site has a database of over 330m search terms, so is widely considered to provide a fairly accurate view of current search trends.

Once you type in the phrases you think will be popular, Wordtracker will come back with a score based on the number of users searching for that phrase. You’ll be surprised how differently people search compared to how you perceive they will search.  You can get a free trial (limited functionality), or sign up for monthly or annual usage of the site.  A monthly subscription currently costs around £28.

Keyword Spy – http://www.keywordspy.com

A handy tool to find out which keywords your competitors are using. Type in their web address, and the tool will return the words your competitors are targeting. It is no free, currently $89 per month, although you can sign up to a free trial.