Keyword research is a practice used by search engine optimization professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search. Search engine optimization professionals research keywords in order to achieve better rankings in search engines. Once a niche keyword is found, it is expanded upon to find similar keywords. The process is usually aided by keyword suggestion tools, which offer thesaurus and alternate keyword suggestion functionality. Most of the time the various search engines provide their own keyword suggestion tools as well which also include the number of searches made for each of those keywords. This information is then used in order to select the correct keyword depending on the SEO goals of the website.