There are at least a bazillion ways to come up with keywords and do research on them, possibly not quite a bazillion but close. Seems to me that every expert out there has their own system and they want you to purchase it. If you think about that you will most likely come to the conclusion that if everyone is using the same tool, they are all getting the same information. Are some of these tools good, yes. But you should consider them only a tool.
The reason we do keyword research is to find words or phrases that we might be able to rank for in search engines. In other words, a way to get found for what we are trying to be recognized for. In the case of this post the keywords that I am targeting are keyword research. There is quite a bit of volume on this search term so you probably did not get to this page looking for keyword research. More likely you found this page as a referral off of another page that ranks for a lower volume keyword. Everyone is fighting for those top 10 positions in the search engines over all and Google specifically. We need to pick our keywords (think battles) carefully. Some keywords we will win with others are just to strong to go up against, those positions can be beat out over time with perseverance if we keep in mind that the war is usually won by consistent small victories not in the fighting of one big battle.
Here is a free and easy way to do keyword research that works marvelously:
Go to Google’s keyword tool and type in your keyword idea or you can type in your webpage URL and see what Google thinks your page is about. There is a little arrow to the right of the word or phrase that you can click to either search that term or get insights. To search the word or phrase for competition type[ intitle:"yourphrase"] into the Google search bar. (keep the parenthesis lose the brackets and there is no space between the colon and the first parenthesis) What will come back will be all of the webpages that have that phrase or word in the title. This is your competition. Look at the pages near the top. Are they strong pages having a Google page ranking of three or more? Or are they articles from article directories, Squidoo or Hubpages articles, or even webpages that are poorly constructed? You maybe able to rank against those if you are new to internet marketing. You might want to get this handy tool bar for judging page rank and strength of your competition for keyword research.
The goal is to look for words or phrases that have a small to reasonable amount of search traffic, not try to go after the huge search traffic. There might only be a handful of people looking for your particular word or phrase, however, chances are good that the more targeted the traffic the more interested they are going to be in what you have to say or sell.
Here are a few keyword tools that I know of and have used: Jaaxy, Market Samari and All in Scraper. Of the three, I really like all in scraper the best it is easy to use and not well known, Jaaxy is the easiest to use but comes with a monthly fee, and Market Samari is the most comprehensive, involves a one time payment and is very well supported. Excellent training available for that one.