If you find the right keywords you will more likely find success on the internet. Keywords drive the search engines and many webmasters know this but they still fail to find the best keywords for their website.

The best tool for this is the father of keyword research, Wordtracker. Most SEO's believe that Wordtracker will give the best results, especially when compared to the Overture keyword finder. You must be a paying subscriber to use Wordtracker but they do have a free trial subscription.

Another "pay as you go" keyword site and in my opinion is as good if not better than Wordtracker is the newer Keyword Discovery site. They were a little shaky when they started a few years ago, but have grown into a formidable opponent to Wordtracker.

The Overture keyword tool is a free tool. Many SEO's frown upon Overture because they feel the results are not accurate, I tend to like them. Overture's results are not as precise as Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery. Overture tends to lump all singular and plural phrases into one singular phrase category. This makes knowing what is searched for hard and you have to guess which keyword term to use as in "automobile" or "automobiles". You have to think to yourself how you would search for the term and go with your gut feeling. Wordtracker gives you results for both terms and is a little more accurate.

There are many keyword tools that use Overtures keyword research. A free tool and one that I recommend is Good Keywords, by Softnik Technologies. It can be downloaded free from their website.

Digital Point's free Keyword Suggestion tool at digitalpoint.com is an excellent tool that will give you both wordtracker and overture keyword suggestions. Though, you are limited to the first 10 keywords on Wordtracker.

Finally, Google's Keyword tool at: adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool is also a very good tool to try. It is suppossed to be used for your adwords campaign but it can find nice targeted keywords and it is a free tool.

Finding the right keywords for your site is not very hard. Though I think it is important to do research and not rush into it. You must come up with the initial search term you are thinking of using. Then input it into one of the keyword search sites and see what keywords they find.

Look for phrases instead of single words. It is best to look for 3 to 5 word phrases. This will ensure that searchers who are looking for your product are really interested in that keyword and not just browsing general keywords to see what they can find.

Searchers don't look for Acne. They might be looking for "acne skin conditions" or "acne cream that works". These terms are much more targeted and though they might get fewer searches than just the word, "acne", you will have visitors to your site who are interested and more willing to buy.

Now, compile a list of the best keywords or keyword phrases. This might be five or fifty and it depends on how large you want your site to be. Go to Google.com and do a Google search for each keyword. Look at the results in the top right hand corner. This will tell you your competition.

Now you must do a little analysis. You are looking for keywords that have the most searches from the tool you used and the least number of competing sites as listed in your Google results.

You will need a spreadsheet for this. If you don't have one go to OpenOffice.org and download their Open Office suite. It is a very good product and comparable to Microsoft Office Suite.

Start your spreadsheet program and you will need to use three columns. From left to right label the columns: Keyword searches, Google Competition and S/GC. For, every keyword fill in the column. The first column will have the searches from your Keyword Suggestion Tool. The second column will have the results from the Google Competition results you found from Google. In the third column you will divide the searches by the Google Competition. You want keywords with a lower S/GC. The lower score the better. A lower number tells you that for a given keyword there will be less competition for the searches performed by searchers.

Choose the best keywords from your list and these will be the keywords you will want to focus on with individual web pages on your site. This brief introduction into keyword mining will get you started on the right track to acquiring traffic to your website. Good Luck.