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Keyword Research Tools
If you are new to Search Engine Marketing and Optimization you might just want to go and get yourself a cup of coffee and take a deep breath. Learning about how to deal with your keywords is necessary! " Over 80% of all online transactions begin with a keyword search. To compete, you need to target all the relevant keywords." Keyword Discovery
Many of us use keyword research tools in order strengthen our pay per click (PPC) campaigns and improve the website's on-site SEO power. Finding the tool that works for you can effectiviely make your number of visitors grow exponentially.
I have used Keyword Discovery simple because I think that this tool is more European oriented, as it supports many different languages, and it is not so Google oriented, which is important in many countries in Europe with a more powerful YAHOO! and MSN presence. But I have not really done any structured benchmarking between the two most used keyword tools - Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker. John Alexander from Search Engine Workshop just wrote a great post in which he compares the two keyword research tools mentioned above - Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery - How do they compare?
A third very widely used tool that in addition is free of charge is Keyword Suggestion Tool. "This is a handy little tool which will show you the results of your query from both Wordtracker and Overture for determining which phrases are searched most often. Enter a search phrase below to see how often it's searched for, as well as get suggestions for alternate (but similar) keywords. Then, once you know the keywords you want to target, you can use the free keyword position tracking tool to monitor your placement progress." Keyword Suggestion Tool.
Final Point - My experience tells me that you must combine the more theoretical approach, which according to me is the usage of a keyword research tool, with the real-life data that you get access to via for example YAHOO! Search Marketing (YSM) and Google Adwords. A PPC campaign not only gives you exact data on what your potential customers search for, but also how your webpage convert on every single keyword that you place a bid on.
Start Building Quality Links for Your Web Site
Here is a great 2 min article on how you should work with link building
This article takes you through what quality content is and how you can leverage on your unique quality content in your link building work.
The Author:
Roger Montti lives in San Francisco & specializes in site reviews and site audits, as well as link development.
Google's Universal Search & Your Business
Universal Search is the ultimate search across all the content sources on the web; blog results, images, video results, local/map results, news results, books, patents, finance, code and catalogues. Including all "content elements" in the organic search result will effect the placement of your products & services in the Google search engine. For deeper understanding read Danny Sullivan's explanation - Google 2.0: Google Universal Search.
By continuously comparing and ranking all web information in real time Google can provide a single, integrated set of search results that, in the ideal world, is exactly what you are searching for. For example if you search for "Hillary Clinton Iraq policy" you do not only want to get results related to traditional search result but also most popular blog post, most viewed video on YouTube and so on. Here is the Google Press Release on "Universal Search".
Some tips on how your business can leverage on Universal Search
Here's an example: If you are selling mobile phones over the Internet, e.g. Katshing or UK Phone Shop, you should start thinking about how to broaden your services and include other media channels than the web.
Examples on how a retailer for mobile phones can prepare for the Universal Search Trend:
Create a video tutorial when you release new mobile phones
Start a blog-session on Blogger that covers the differences between this new model and previous
Give a 3-d presentation of that new super nice mobile phone model - sell it visually
Google's Matt Cutts - Duplication of Content
Quick VIDEO-note on the risk of duplicating content (6 min 47 sec)
In short and veeeery simplified - if you copy content and post it on your web site or media channel you are duplicating content. Google, YAHOO! etc does not appreciate duplication of content and are likely to punish you....
Here is a great interview from Matt Cutts. He joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000 and is currently the head of Google's Webspam team.
Matt is great fun to listen to 
Semantic Indexing - Rank Up Your Site
Enrich the content of your webpage through Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). LSI is a method used in order to position a word's distribution across the whole of the web. Web pages with many words in common are close to each other (semantically close) and pages with a few words in common to be semantically distant. The LSI-relationship between web pages is analyzed as the different SEs' spiders crawl the web. Spiders use LSI as one of the quality checks. Thanks to semantic indexing the spiders can evaluate your web site's relevance for certain keywords & compare your site's content with the content of thousands of other sites' content.
So the spiders that crawl the web therefore spend part of their time evaluating this LSI-factor, i.e. the relationship between the words on a site. Simplified - the co-occurrence between two words, e.g. "Norway" and "Oslo" is the measurement of the two words LSI-factor. When you add LSI as a measurement of the web sites quality it gives the SEs considerable more power to cut through the BS, spam, and promotional links, copy, etc. As the average query word length expands from 3 to 4 to perhaps 5 words or beyond, SEs can continue to provide relevant results, even if the particular "keyword phrase" is not found on a site. Semantic indexing "constructs" a relationships between words based on number of times these two words are found together, so if you write "Oslo" on Google, the SE know that "Oslo" is related to "Norway" and perhaps consider a site that combines "Oslo" and "Norway" as more relevant than a site that purely focus on "Oslo".
The Google, YAHOO!, Ask (and you have it..) spiders that crawl the web, become more and more intelligent, a must in order to extract relevant info when scanning the billions of web pages out there. The more relevant content they extract the more precise result they can provide. If we receive a precise result from the queries that we perform we'll come back for more. Why spiders work hard to provide it's users with the most relevant results. Relevant results makes the users come back for more and search engine (SE) can earn more money on marketing.
When I write content for a web page I initiate the process by searching on the keyword that is important to me on Google, YAHOO! etc. I go through the pages that the SE provide me with and perhaps use some analysis tools, e.g. DomainTools. By doing this I understand the basic structure on these sites, inbound links, domain age, keywords etc. I then extract the important keywords and run a query on Quintura. This LSI-tool gives you a good indication of what co-occurring words a SE spider expect to find on your site as you optimize for a certain keyword phrase.
I punch in Norway and the words that occur most often on web sites that have Norway written in the content appears to be; country, travel guide, vacations, map and many more words.
Main Point: If you want to work your way up the organic search results for a particular keyword, pay attention to what co-occurring words the SEs' spiders expect to find.