You don’t need to use paid keyword tools or services to conduct proper keyword research. One of the best-kept secrets to increase website traffic is simply to write about what’s popular now. A lot of people make keyword research a lot harder than it is, and that’s a shame.

If you want to know the general ideas for a niche, then go to an article directory and see what categories are listed there. An indication of popular niches would be a lot of articles in a certain category. To see what keywords are getting the most page views per article, search for those keywords on the search engines to see what articles come up then open thie first article to see how many page views it received.

The next best way to use free keyword research is to use the YouTube search engine. All you have to do here is search for certain keywords and phrases, then in the results which which videos got the most hits. This is a crucial tip for you if you intend to use video marketing as part of your traffic generation strategy.

The third best way to conduct free keyword research is to use Google’s keyword tool to gather together a nice list of related keywords. Google’s keyword tool is notoriously inaccurate when it comes to reporting actual search volume statistics, which is why it’s best use for doing LSI, latent semantic indexing keyword research.

The best keyword research and niche research is done when it is based on the reality, not numbers some tool gave you. The best way to do realistic keyword research is to see how many views the articles and video related to your niche got. Also when deciding on a niche just use common sense and think about what’s popular offline, as it will most likely be popular online, too