While Google Adwords Keywords Tool is certainly a universally-used free keyword research tool, there are several other free keyword research tools like Wordtracker, which offer both paid and free keyword research tools. The difference between Wordtracker’s paid and free keyword research tools is basic. When you key in a keyword, keywords or key phrase into the search box, the free tool limits the search results to the top 100 suggestions for free users. The paid tool, on the contrary, generates 1000’s of search results, which could mean massive savings in terms of time and money.  Like the Google Adwords Keywords Tool, the Wordtracker also helps website owners and internet marketers find keywords and keyword phrases used by surfers relevant to their business or that of their client’s work. Yet, unlike the Google Adwords Keywords Tool, Wordtracker offers several additional features. First and foremost, the tool can be added to popular browser such as Internet Explorer and Firefox. This means that when you browse the Internet for information, products or services, Wordtracker will provide you with details related to the term you are searching.

Other features include the facility to save lists and access them through Wordttracker whenever you want, and the ability to import and export lists.

You can also check competition for the word you are interested on a specific search engine in one place rather having to go from search engine to search engine to find results specific to that search engine.

At the time of writing this blog, Wordtracker’s paid version was priced at US $329 per annum or US $59 per month. In terms of pound, annual subscription worked out to be ₤161 or while monthly subscription was ₤28 a month.

You may have wondered why I have been insistent on keyword research preceding the registration of a domain. The answer is that if you decide on your keyword and then register your domain name, in that order, you could push up page rank with target keyword in url  too.

What this means is that if your research shows that there is demand for content on a subject, say, “How to Blog For Money”, then it makes imminent sense for you to include the keyword in the url too.

That way, you would be able to leverage not only what goes into your pages, namely SEO-rich web content, but also other places on your website.

Effectively, if you follow this route, you would be able to push up page rank with target keyword in url, the blog title, content heading as well as the web content itself.

Compare this with what your competitor could do. Let's call him Mike. Now assume Mike likes to see his name in the url. So he registers his domain as mike.com while you go on to register your domain with the keyword of your choice, say howtoblogformoney.net. In Mike's case, he would be able to have his target keyword in content, on his blog title and possibly, the page heading.

You, on the contrary, could do all of the things that Mike does—as well as enjoy the additional advantage of pushing up the page rank of your blog by having the target keyword in the url too.

To illustrate the point, I ran a search like any other searcher interested in learning about how to blog for money. I keyed in the terms, “how to blog for money” without the quote marks in the google search box.

I found that out of the 10 results thrown up by Google on page 1, (this is at the time of writing), two of the links had the keyword, howtoblogformoney in the url, while 8 did not have them.

Amongst the top three was Problogger, even though it did not have the search terms in the url, while two websites, with the keyword, howtoblogformoney, in their url ranked No 5 and No 8 respectively.

Of these, the No 5 position was held by a blog with blogspot, while this blog ranked No 8.

Now you may wonder why I would consider a Google page rank of No 8 worthy of even a passing mention, when your goal, like mine, is to wrangle the No 1 position.

The answer is that this rank was achieved within 14 days of the first blog post being made, without any other effort at promoting the blog!

Many webmasters argue that they do not optimize their website for one keyword. Instead their goal is to optimize it for several keywords. So having the target keyword in url is not as much a must as creating quality content.

For instance, someone who is targeting traffic seeking information on how to blog for money is likely to optimize their site not only for the keyword, howtoblogformoney, but also for related keywords such as howtoblog and blogformoney.

Hence, getting a leg-up for one's target keyword is not enough. Instead, the trick is to concentrate on creating keyword-rich content, instead of depending on a keyword-rich domain name to attract traffic.

There can be no argument about the fact that content is king on the Internet, may it be with surfers or with search engines. But having said that, there is no denying the fact that having your target keyword in url does give the small push to your big goal.