What keyword research tool do you use and how effective is it?

If you are serious about search engine optimization, then Wordtracker is an essential investment, a must have resource for any search engine marketing professional. It combines both a respectable search term database with tools that make mining the information easy.|||To be completely honest with you, I don't use one type of tool in fact, I utilize both paid and free tools or rather I use paid tools and then check them with my free methods. For my free methods, I basically use shopping sites' site maps like shopping.com to find "hot keywords". Then, I do an in depth competitive analysis using search engines. Next, I search for keywords (using only .com, .net or .org). Afterwards, I use Google adwords keyword research tool and then look for long tailed keywords. Then, I dig a little deeper to make sure that the keywords meet my precise specification and lastly I build my sites. I've been using this method for awhile now and it works very well.