There are several ways to determine the best keywords for use in your AdWords campaigns. You can probably do trial and error, but if it is absolutely critical for you to get the best results outright, you should familiarize yourself with tools that help you arrive at the best key words, phrases and combinations for your campaign.

Here’s a rule of thumb when choosing keywords or phrases. They should be specific enough for getting quality visitors, and popular enough to get volume traffic. But the keywords, phrases or combinations thereof should not be too popular that the competition would be too tough to render you any optimal positioning, or would require you to submit bids that are too high for your budget, in order to get top placement.

Being specific is subjective, and should be of your own choice. The following are examples of tools that would help you determine popularity, and competition in keyword selection.

• The Google AdWords keyword tool
• Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing)
• Crossword Complier
• Espotting
• 7Search

Some, like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, are free and available for use by anyone. Others, such as Espotting and 7Search, are commercial offerings, and would require users to subscribe or pay before enjoying the benefits.

We shall discuss each tool of note in detail next.