A website redesign/overhaul can be a daunting task but, for some, a necessary one.  One of the first steps, from an SEO perspective, is to define your target list of keywords to use when optimizing your site for search.  I have heard recommendations of having anywhere from 300 to 500 keyword on your list.  Keep in mind you will optimize each page of your site for only 2-5 keywords.

Here is a list of the top keyword research tools you may want to use:

Keyword Discovery – According to their web site, Keyword Discovery has a database that tracks over 36 billion searches from 200 search engines worldwide over the last 12 months, including seasonal trends over this time period.  This tool is useful in building keyword lists, overall campaign planning and competitive research.

Price: Standard – $69.95 monthly/$599.40 annually; Enterprise – $495 monthly/$4455 annually.  They offer a free trial with limited functionality.

Wordtracker – Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client’s business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors.  Marketers can also determine how many competing sites are using those keywords and can identify the phrases that have the greatest traffic potential.  Wordtracker periodically compiles a database of over 330 million search terms which is updated on a weekly basis. All search terms are collected from the major metacrawlers – Dogpile and Metacrawler.

Price: $59 monthly/ $329 annually.  They offer a 7-day free trial.

Wordze – With a database of about 552 million keywords and 68 million unique search terms, Wordze is a great tool for building keyword lists.  But it is also valuable as a tool to assist in creating SEO strategies, as it provides analysis on competing sites on specific search terms.

Price: $38.98 monthly, $7.95 1-day trial

Google AdWords Keyword Tool – If you are running (or plan on running) a Google Adwords campaign, then this tool is critical to your sucess. One can only guess the size of the database (all of Google?) and how frequently it is updated, but it is excellent at showing you what a site looks like according to the Google spiders.  While a free tool, it does not lack in features.

Price: Free

KeywordSpy – KeywordSpy offers analytics to study competitors’ tactics as well as monitor their online search campaigns.  According to their website, their database includes over one billion keywords.  Best used for competitive research.

Price: monthly subscription from $89.95 – $139.95.  They offer a free trial with limited functionality.

SEMRush – SEMRush uses 25 million of the most popular and expensive keywords to collect Google search results. SEMRush can show you keywords for any domain ranked high enough to be in top 20 search results results or that purchases AdWords.  It helps you to keep track of your competitors, uncover your competitors’ organic and AdWords’ keywords, find their landing pages, discover your own long-tail keywords, and check Google rankings of any site.

Price: monthly subscriptions from $19.95 – $499.95.  Free version available with limited functionality and only 10 queries per day.

SEO Book’s Keyword Tool – This keyword tool is powered by Wordtracker’s API. You can explore more keywords by subscribing to their powerful keyword research tools.  Offers rough suggested daily search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.  Provides links to price estimate tools from Google AdWords.  Links to various vertical databases like Topix.net, Google Blogsearch, and Del.icio.us to let you know if people are talking about your topic and what types of resources they are referencing.  Is driven off the Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool. If you sign up for a Wordtracker account they offer many additional keyword research features and tools that are lacking in our basic keyword tool.

Price: Free

SpyFu – The SpyFu database can point to which sites and advertisers rank highly for any given keyword phrase.  They can also indicate advertising trends, including Top 500 Advertisers, Top 500 Organically Ranked Domains, Top 500 Most Clicked Terms, Top 1000 Most Expensive Keywords.  Best for competitive research.

Price: $38.50 monthly.  Free registration for basic features.

Google Insights for Search – Insights can help you determine which messages resonate best, determine seasonality, create brand associations, and determine a new market.  Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. It then shows you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.  Keep in mind it was created for advertisers.

Price: Free, need to have a Google account

HubSpot Inbound Marketing System’s Keyword Grader – This is what I use.  You import your list of keywords (or type them in one by one) and it shows you how many monthly searches that term gets, how difficult it is to rank for that term, your website’s current rank and the cost per click.  Once you have had your tracking scripts on your website it will also show you how many visits you are getting from each keyword.  There is also a competitors view to see how you compare on each term vs. each competitor.  HubSpot actually does A LOT more than this so I didn’t originally include them in the list but since it is what I use I thought I should add them on.

Price: $250 monthly subscription (mostly for business owners) or $500 monthly subscription for closed loop marketing analytics and salesforce.com integration

Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more website redesign tips.