One of the most popular tools around, and it is totally free to use, for compiling a list of great keywords is the Google Adwords keyword tool. You can use this tool for any keyword research you may have, whether you use the keywords for your website or with your article marketing. You don’t need to be running an Adwords campaign to use the tool.

As a matter of fact, you don’t even need to sign up for Adwords, you can just go to the tool and use it whenever you want to. If you are new to internet marketing you should stay as far away from paid traffic as possible right now. Paid traffic can give you a high rate of return on your investment, but only if you know what you are doing.

Learning to do it right takes time and guess what happens while you are learning? You guessed it, you will be spending a lot of money. That is an expensive education.

With so many wonderful ways to get highly targeted traffic for free, why would you even consider paying for it until you are at the point in your career where you are actually making money?

You will still need great keywords for all of your free traffic generation. Whether you choose to use on site optimization also called search engine optimization or article marketing.

The definition of a ‘good’ keyword can be a little vague but a general idea would be any keyword that gets a lot of monthly searches and has relatively little competition.

What constitutes good monthly searches can vary from one niche to another, but a good rule of thumb is to find keywords that get over 1,500 searches a month but have less than 20,000 competitors. To find the best parameters for your needs and your niche, you may have to test a little bit.

Another aspect of a good keyword is that it is very tightly related to the subject of your website. For example, if you find a keyword for bird watching binoculars that meets all the above criteria, you may be tempted to use it. But if your website is about bird feeders it isn’t relevant to the content of your site and you should avoid using it.

The number of times you should place your keyword in your article is another thing you need to consider. Keyword density again, can be somewhat vague but a good thing to keep in mind is that when you read your article out loud it should sound natural. If you keep repeating the same word or phrase over and over again, it’s not natural and it’s likely that you are using the keyword too often.

Learning the right way to compile a keyword list can truly be the difference between success and failure in your online business. It can also be the difference between things being really difficult and things going more easily.

Using something free like the Google Adwords keyword tool can make your hunt for great, and very profitable, keywords quicker and easier and what could be better than that?