If you have a home business with an online presence (and these days who doesn’t?), finding ways to drive more traffic to your website is likely often in your mind.

One of the things many spend a lot of time agonizing over are “keywords” they should be using to draw traffic to their site. You can hire a dozen different SEO specialists and it is likely they will all give you a different answer. So why bother with all that fuss and expense in the first place; especially since one of the most powerful keyword tools available anywhere is free?

Google Trends is a keyword research tool which allows you to see instantly how many people are searching for the keywords you are considering using on your site. For example perhaps you are torn between using “baby toy” or “baby toys”. Simply head to Google Trends and type the two terms into the search box. Google trends will then generate a color coded line graph that displays the search frequency for the terms you entered for the last three years.

Google trends will also return a list of news stories published online over the period of time relating to your keywords which, can help when deciding on the content of your promotional blogs or articles. While this may not be an answer to all of your SEO needs, it certainly is a nice free tool that is easy to use.