This tool is available at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. It is a great tool to use—just check if your results are for the right language and country, and then fill in your keywords. You can find those options and alter them by using the screen just above the input table. Then type the characters shown to you and hit Get keyword ideas and look how Google gives you information about:

After you run the tool, take a closer look at the screen, click on the small drop-down button, and select Show All.

You now have more information than in the default screen. One thing that stands out for the targeted terms are the trends. You can clearly see that April and May have the largest search volume, which is not surprising considering that these are the months when people want to start working on their garden. What is also nice to see is that landscape gardening has a lot more searches than garden landscaping.

For your site topic you can now start adding terms to your list. Don't forget the keywords that will bring you local results. In case of landscape gardening, "Los Banos" should be included in the terms to target. Using your village location in the keywords and phrases, you are going to target direct traffic that will convert better than just the general keywords.

If you are going to use the location item, make sure to include the surrounding villages and try to get traffic from those places as well. There are some easy ways to do this, which I will show you once we get to the writing section.

As you can see in the picture, selecting the Approx Avg Search Volume as the basic sorting field will show you how large the number will be of your potential visitors.

If you are targeting a special niche and want to get some revenue through Google AdSense you can also see the average price that AdWords users will have to pay per click. If you are not targeting a niche, it will give you some indication of how difficult it will be to rank well. The higher the price for a keyword or phrase, the more likely it is that you have many competitors.

We will be looking at those competing numbers later.

Once you have selected these keywords, click on Add, make sure you scroll down the page as it holds some great findings for you—the Additional keywords to be considered field! You might notice that in the first results you did not find the term landscape garden. However, once we go down to the additional keywords section you can see that landscape contractors is popping up and so is gardeners, but that is a more generic search and much more difficult to rank for. Go through your Additional keywords to be considered list and click on Add, if you think you have found a relevant term to consider. It should give you some new ideas to work with. It will also give you an insight on how Google thinks these terms are related.

Once you get into structuring your web site for optimal results, you are going to use this knowledge to your advantage. Remember to do several keyword searches with this tool, in the same session you can also build your basic keyword list very quickly.

After adding your most important keyword phrases, click on Get more related keywords. Google will insert all the keywords and phrases you selected into the search field, saving you lot of time as you will not be required to type them again. Plus, it gives you new ideas instantly—isn't that great!

I told you earlier that I like Excel for importing .csv files. This Google tool has a sidebar using which you can build your keyword file to import from. Once you are done with adding keywords, use the export function to download your keyword file. You can import the keywords and sort them later. I would also encourage you to take a screenshot of the list of keywords you find.

The list is built from a large number of searches, ordered by frequency, but after the import you loose this sorting as it is then sorted alphabetically. By using the screenshot you can sort it again based on the numbers in the screenshot.

Another great tool is the free version of Wordtracker, but that will give you a maximum of 100 results. It is not my favorite tool, but it shows you some extra information on the search topics such as daily search indication. It is available at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.

In the Wordtracker tool you fill in the keyword or phrase that you want to investigate. If you are building a site that is more focused on adult entertainment you can remove the adult content filter, but for most of us it is best kept active. The results presented in the following screenshot are daily search numbers, instead of the monthly figures used by Google's keyword tool.

Wordtracker offers paid services as well. The above mentioned free tools are limited in the number of results that they are allowed to pull from the Wordtracker database. On the Wordtracker site the service is promoted as a subscription with which you will be able to:

Of course this comes at a price, 59 USD per month or 329 USD per year at the time I am writing this. You can get started with a 7-day trial to check if it works for you.

If you have the money to spend, use the tool intensively for a month, as it is the number one choice of search engine optimizers across the globe.

Another tool that uses the Wordtracker database might give you some better ideas, as it also shows Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (Live) daily estimates for searches. This tool is called SEO Book Keyword Tool and is available at http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/.

After you have typed the term you want to research, make sure you click on the Submit button. A simple Enter will not start the process of finding the keywords, you have to click on Submit.

Once the information is processed you will see the following screen. In the field to the right you can click on other tools that will show you the results instantly. The one you should try for sure is Google's search-based keyword tool. This is a new tool that has a slightly different approach than the AdWords tool. You have to keep in mind that the date used is limited to the previous month(s), and hence it will change as trends and seasons change.

For the landscape gardening site this is really important, as it will be for any season-influenced results. Therefore, make sure to use every tool available to get the overall picture.

In the SEO Book Keyword Tool you also have the possibility to export to CSV. However, you get all the terms and you cannot preselect the ones you like.

Keyword Elite is a piece of software that will cost you about 176 USD, but you get a great tool for that price. It is available at http://www.keywordelite.com

With Keyword Elite you can easily research all your keywords with one program and it will dish out the best phrases you could possibly want. Uncovering search terms that you probably would not have found quickly without the tool. It's easy to use, once you get the hang of it, and it is well worth the trouble of learning. The documentation is very clear, so you can get started right away.

You can start with the keyword list building process and choose from which sources the list should extract the keyword phrases.

Once the initial search is done, you can start refining the results by selecting the field, which is capable of either eliminating some terms or refining per search engine. Of course, some sorting options for alphabetical order and even the number of words in the search phrase are available.

The best keywords are not only specific, but you also get the Parent Keyword, which gives you some idea for category names in your Joomla! site.

What I really like about Keyword Elite is that it is fast and easy. If you have an account on commercial sites such as Wordtracker or KeywordDiscovery, you can use them right from this tool.

Under the Preferences option you can also set the Google and Yahoo! region to get the keywords from—the standard setting is the US.

The thing I don't like about it is the fact that it is not so easy to see the number of searches per day or month or the number of competitors on a certain term.

Internet Business Promoter (IBP) is a complete tool for doing SEO research and it has a keyword research option too. It is available at http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/.

IBP claims to get you top 10 positions in Google and it delivers just that. I have several web sites that rank in the top 10 after implementing some of the tips and changes IBP suggested for those sites.

Although you get a complete report on the sections of your web site that need to be optimized, you still need to do the work for a Joomla! site. Here this book will help you by pointing at those specific tasks that you might need to address. For example, the possible need to extend your title tag for search engines where you don't want to change the title on the article page itself. More on this is available in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.

IBP provides a nice tool for keyword research and helps you gain more insight in the fields that you are searching for. IBP also has the ability to get keywords for other regions and languages.

Once you have set the regions you want the results for, you get a list of possible keywords along with both the number of searches that are done per month and the number of pages you are competing against. This is followed by a number called KEI x 1000. Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) is calculated as (Number of searches per month^2)/Number of competing sites. The higher the KEI the better, but you need to look at the real competition and decide if the keyword is really the one you want to go after.

In the following screenshot you can see that the first two keywords have an extremely high KEI value, but if you look at the terms you know that they are too generic to focus on for you to realistically get a high ranking. Keep in mind the goal of your web site and think about how well these terms will work for reaching that goal.

You can click on Trends shown in the previous screenshot and view the trends on Google Trends. This is really beneficial. You can see when to add new content to your site to gain momentum as the market is waking up after the winter season.

As I mentioned before, IBP is an optimization tool that will help you to get higher positions. It does that by analyzing the top 10 competitors for a large number of items like phrases used in the title, the domain name, meta descriptions, meta keywords, images, loading time, and lots more.

The report that is created gives a comparison of your site to the competition. It shows you where you need to change things, including some tips on how and what to change. It is up to you to make those changes. Once you are done, run the report again and see if your site has a higher score now, and thus chance of improving in ranking for the keywords of your choice.

The initial score for the landscape gardening site is shown in the following screenshot. You can see that we need to do some work on this site for it to rank well.

There are many other tools and sites that can help you with your keyword research, but the above tools we just discussed are the ones I found best and easiest to work with. Let's now look at the last commercial tool.

It draws results from several search engines, but still I have not seen it pull up any new findings. Visit http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html.

The following screenshot shows results of the free version. They also have a paid subscription-based model and software that starts at 69.95 USD per month. With that subscription you get more results and you can see the past 12 months of trends for the searches of the keyword. In the case of landscape gardening you should see a decline towards the winter season and some growth in the spring.

You can purchase the SEO Toolkit that extends beyond the keyword research and is a more complete SEO tool such as IBP from Trellian, the owner of KeywordDiscovery. It has been around for a long time, so it must be worth the money, but in this case I am not speaking from experience.

Looking at these three tools I can say that if you just want to do basic research on keywords, you should use Keyword Elite as it is really focused on delivering a great set of parent keywords and very specific search terms that fall under those keywords. IBP. However, goes beyond keyword suggestions and gives you a complete tool to optimize your site from beginning to end. You can use KeywordDiscovery to verify whether you are on the right track with the keywords you selected, but you should rely on it for that.