SEO tends to have a bad reputation among some journalists. Many tend to see search engine optimisation as the equivalent of writing headlines for robots.

But SEO isn’t about turning out bland headlines for Google. It is about helping readers find what they are looking it. It is about matching readers searching for specific news and information with the content on your site.

Here are five free SEO tools can help journalists make their work more findable on the web.

• SEOMoz Term Extractor: This tool analyses the content of a page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines. It is a useful tool to gain an overall perspective of the keywords in the text.
• Wordtracker FreeKeywords: A tool to suggest alternative keywords with a weighting to indicate their use.
• Microsoft Keyword Forecast: A tool from Microsoft adCenter Labs that aims to forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.
• Google Trends:  This Google tool analyses a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter.
• Google Insights for Search: Another Google tool that enables you to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.