To compete with SEO, it's essential to have the best tools at your fingertips enabling you to find new opportunities, save time and keep track of how your SEO can be boosted and keyword ha been an a central component of SEO.

Keywords are originally the beginning and end of an SEO, and that picking the right keyword is very much necessary and this could deliberately increase your rankings for those specific words, monitoring your progress with great precision. 

But nowadays, keyword game has been very complicated by a handful of different factors. These factors involve Google's Hummingbird Update which has radically change the way Google views keywords. Lack of Precise Ranking Information is another factor which makes it difficult to determine ranking because google no longer provides this information. Another is the Volatility of Rankings  which meddles with the potential consistency of a keyword strategy. And another factor is Focusing Too Much on Keywords that can compromise the user's experience, hampering your brand reputation or costumer loyalty. 

Now, here are the 6 top tools for keyword research:

*Google Keyword Planner-a must have tools for three reasons; straight from the source, its free and it is specifically designed to give you accurate keyword information. 

*Moz's Keyword Explorer-Moz has always offered a exceptional tools for SEO and one of their latest, the Keyword Explorer, is no exception. This tool is more purported to be more accurate as Google rounds its data. 

*Ubersuggest-isn't as robust as Google's or Moz's tools, but it doesn't need to be. Google and Moz excel at giving you information for keywords and phrases you enter, but Ubersuggest's strength lies in helping you come up with more keyword ideas.

*Soolve-takes a similar approach as Ubbersuggest but with one critical difference; it relies on auto-suggest features of several different engines at once including Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Amazon, Bling, Yahoo and Answers. This is specially useful when one is planning on marketing the content or brand on different platforms.

*SEMRush-is a paid tool. Highly valuable for SEO in general even beyond its keyword research. Using this tool, if you pull up your domain, you'll be able to pull up tons of information about the site including where your ranking, what your ranking for, and where your competitors are ranking compared to you.

*SpyFu-is another tool which focuses on the amount of competition your facing, which is ideal if you are already falling behind your competitors. 

With all or some of the tools above you will be able to gain better understanding of the keywords you choose to target and will ultimately wind up with a better strategy.