"A reader has asked:I'd really like some keyword/SEO software that kind of automates stuff and makes the whole keyword thing simple. i hear wordtracker is great. but in your opinion, whats the must-have keyword-selecting software (or site)?"

I have talked at length about Keyword Selection tools vs Keyword Software Systems in the past And I will try to some up the differences in whats out there for you and anyone else who is interested in obtaining better traffic thru the search engines.

Here are my top nuggets when it comes to Keyword Analysis, Keyword software, SEO and targeted traffic:

1) Before getting caught up on keywords, understand your market, where you fit in that market, what you want to do in that market, the terminology of that market, your competitors in that market and the realities of ecommerce/affiliate marketing in that market. If you fail to take the time to do this step then you will never have a focused plan for your blog or web business and your success will be greatly limited.

2) After writing down the answers to the question in 1 (along with your Business Plan for what your goals are and how you want to try to achieve those goals) you can start looking into the wonderful world of SEO and Keywords. To Start you can browse are many many articles on the subject at: http://www.keywordsoftwareguide.com/category/keywords-software-articles.

To make it easy I will give yon some basic KEYWORD LAWS (according to me anyhow):

1) Researching Keywords with a free tool Like wordtracker or google adwords or whatever is NOT ENOUGH!  If you are serious bout this then you need to invest $50-$100 (you don't need to spend more IMO) on a high quality Keyword Software Toll like Keyword Research Pro.

2) Keyword Research is not enough because it is more then just finding keywords for your niche. you need to analyze what keywords your competitors are using, you need to understand the competition for the keywords and how often they are used by ALL the major search engines – not just google. Keyword Research Pro Software will help you with all this and a dozen more critical things.

3) You need to not just analyze the "best" keywords but you need to analyze how they are searched for in phrases so you can use those phrase. 90% of your competitors are just going to try to find the quick top 3 keywords using wordtracker or google or something and try to compete for those words. LET THEM!

4) While they all try to get ranked for the top 3 words you do the research for phrases and long tailed keywords that everyone else is ignoring so your pages can get rankled as #1 in google for those terms. Again Keyword Research Pro will do this analysis for you in MINUTES not days. So will some of the more expensive packages.

5) Using Google, wordtracker or even google wonder wheel (puke) is OK for brainstorming if you want to but it is only a small part of the keyword research and analysis stage.

6) Then you need to learn about all the places on your Website that you can use those keywords. yes there are many more places then just in the articles or in the websites Keywords meta tag. How about with the pictures? How about in the headings, in the file location names and etc. To find out more on this read some of the articles in the link I mentioned above.

7) Once you have your site up and running use one of the many free Website analysis tools like Google webmaster to analyze where you are ranking for what Keywords. This is ESSENTIAL. You did all the work to understand your market and where you fit in it and your business plan to take a piece of it, You did all the work (allot faster and easier with Keyword Research PRO but still a lot of work) to find the terms and phrases, and then you did all the work to site the articles and implant the keywords and phrases and now you are just going to sit back and wonder why the traffics not coming???

NO! Be smart, use a tool that analyses the traffic to your Website and what terms you rank on what pages for on various search engines and then do the analysis to determine why certain phrase or keywords are not working for you! Again Google analytics and google webmaster are free and a great place to start!!

I could go on and on but this is plenty to start with. Again you can go to the section of our Website that is dedicated to FREE high quality, Keyword Research and SEO articles and get all the information you need on this subject!!