What is the best FREE method to do keyword research?

I use the Google Keyword Tool as well and I highly recommend it.

Adam

There are a lot of ways. My personal favorite:

1. Go to ClickBank and find a nice product with decent gravity, check out the earned per sale and make sure it's close to the commission (if it's far off it could mean lots of refunds)
2. Go to Google's Search-based keyword tool (Search-based keyword tool) ... these are things people are already searching for ... find some topics that relate to your product
3. Open the Google Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
4. Put in the term(s) you found that have a reasonable amount of searches from the search-based tool
5. Generate keywords and then use the little drop-down to select "Phrase" ... this will put them all in quotes for you
6. Sort by number of searches and find the "sweet spot" (for me, usually 3-5k monthly ... your mileage may vary) and add them to the selected keywords ("Add Phrase" button)
7. When you have a couple over there, use the "Get More Related Keywords" button on the right
8 Rinse and repeat until you find some that look good

Now they're all in quotes already so you have your phrase-based search. You can either export them to text and cut and paste manually into Google or (what I do) just highlight it including the quotes, right-click and search with Google (might be a Firefox thing, not sure with other browsers)
.. And now you find your competing pages.

Hope that helps some. It's not as fast as Keyword Elite or other software but it is free and very effective. Obviously, once you build 10-20 sites you will start to get a feel for what really works. I hate to say it but it's mostly about practice.

edit - Actually I *usually* export the list to a text file and run a little linux script that gets the competition for me. It returns the keyword name and competing pages (by querying Google with cURL) ... simple and fast. But I would use the Firefox method if I hadn't written the script

As mentioned, there are many ways to do keyword research: you just need to pick one and stick with it.

My 2 preferred ones are the https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker

Lynn terry had a blog post recently exactly about this, and it's very informative. you can see it here: SEO Content: Choosing Keywords & Phrases

She uses the free wordtracker tool for this post, and shows how to pick keyword with commercial intent, how to use keyword qualifiers, etc.

HTH.

Thank you guys, very helpful. I gave you all 'Thanks'

I've been getting much better results from this free tool - ( freekeywords.wordtracker.com )then I did with Google adwords tool. Google is a starting point, but I do not recommend using it as a sole keyword tool. There's so much research that needs to be done to get the best keywords for your site.

It's been mentioned before but I will through in my 2 pence,

Google Keyword Tool - this is what I use and I think its the best. Wordtracker is another on, there is a free version of it as well, this will pull data from other search engins, remember to times the results by 8.

Ok this is how you do keyword research.

Lets just use Google keyword tool and wordtracker.

Ok so we can find keywords using GKT and look at its montly search volume.

We can use wordtracker to find other keywords that give daily volume but you should also get those keywords (from wordtracker) and throw them into GKT to see what kinda searches it's getting.