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Keyword Research Tools allow
you to see what people are searching for on the web, guess what else they might
search for, and then optimize for those keywords. That’s a bit technical, so
let’s break it down. If you go to Google.com and do a search for blogging,
you’ll be taken to a new page where it lists different web pages that talk about
blogging. What you might not realize is your search was recorded. Search engines
keep track of how many people search for different terms. It’s valuable
information. Keyword research tools like I’ve used in
Keyword Tools
collect that information from several search engines to guess how
many times people search for that keyword. It’s not completely accurate, as
these tools don’t have the records from all search engines. The core of every search engine marketing (SEM) campaign is the keyword list.
It's the foundation of a paid search campaign and the key to organic (unpaid)
search engine optimization (SEO). Having an ever-growing, ever-adapting keyword
list and using keyword data to tune a campaign are critically important. That's
why keyword and keyword phrase research and enhancement are worth revisiting as
the SEM landscape evolves.
You need third-party keyword research tools and
resources to build and expand keyword lists for search engine marketing (SEM).
Each popular external keyword research tool has a place in keyword expansion. If
you're not thinking about expanding your keyword list, consider:
The percentage of longer search phrases, as opposed to one or two words,
is increasing. Regardless of portal, there's a trend toward longer search
strings. Several sources suggest over 40 percent of searchers use three or
more terms.
Broad-match listings alone don't provide the best user experience, nor the
highest return on investment (ROI). Break broad listings down into individual,
more specific listings. You'll have more targeted creative and a better-tuned
landing page -- and, therefore, a better site experience.
Before learning to write compelling SEO copy for your website, you have to know how to select the
right keywords. The right keywords are not always what you want them to be – a
number of factors like search volumes, popularity, timing, niche and others
influence what SEO experts call “keyword research.” To perform good research you
need the right tools, and fortunately some very good ones are available for
free. What these provide is adequate for even the top SEO professionals.
Here is a
list of tools to use in your future keyword researches,
and a few tips to know before you start working.
Forget about keyword density – this is not what determines your site’s
position in the SERPs anymore. Keyword density is too easy to game. Instead of
focusing on numbers try focusing on:
Quality and value for the readers
– if what you write is
not what people want to read, keywords will make no difference
Content harmony - many writers tend to repeat keywords
too often, trying to convince the search engines to “rank” their sites for
those specific terms. The technique is called keyword stuffing, and the
effects are negative: exasperated readers, low rankings in the SERPs. The
solution: less is more. Keep keyword density under 3%
Relevance for what you are trying to present in front of your
readers – don’t write about shoes when you sell boots. Both are
footwear right, but the customers who want to buy shoes will feel mislead and
frustrated to have entered the wrong store. Do not mislead your readers for
the sake of SE rankings! Put it this way: traffic is meaningless if it doesn’t
convert into buyers, returning visitors and/or community.
So, if keyword density is no longer a factor in search engine rankings, then
what is? Are keywords no longer important for SEO? As a matter of fact, they
are. Now, more than ever, you need a good keyword strategy to write copy that
places your site higher in the SERPs. It’s not so much a matter of density as it
is a matter of keyword placement within the copy: page title, meta description,
article title, first paragraph, image title, outgoing links, etc.
Now we’d talk about how to select the best keywords and how to write
compelling SEO copy in a future article. Today we start with the basics: some of
the best free keyword research tools.
WordTracker free keyword suggestion tool – it can generate up to
100 related keyword phrases and estimate their daily search volume. WordTracker
uses it own formula to estimate search volumes: number of searches in the WT
database divided by the total number of searches in the WT database and
multiplied with the estimated total number of daily searches on all search
engines. To estimate the searches on all search engines WT collects terms from
Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com (0.63% of searches across all search engines).
This is the reason why you might see major differences between keywords
suggested by WT and other keyword research tools (Google for example.)
Google search
based keyword tool – free for all users, but made to help Google
AdWords customers, it delivers keywords based on actual Google searches and it
matches these to specific pages of a site. I find this tool more useful than
WordTracker’s free version because it offers more data including monthly
searches, competition, suggested bid (let’s you know the financial value of a
certain keyword), suggested categories for the targeted keywords, keyword in
URL, etc.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
- A tool with most trusted data IMO. Ever since Google has started
showing number of searched for the keywords, the value of this tool has
increased many folds as now you can youself calculate the KEI without needing
any paid keyword tool.
Nichebot - I
haven’t used nichebot since 2007 and they seems to have changed alot. They used
to be alot like SEOBook’s current keyword search tool. RIght now it looks they
are using API’s of wordtracerk/google/keywoddiscovery (which they were using
earlier too) and offering some more refined stuff. I will explore them more
later to see are they even offering any paid service or not.
Digital
Point’s Keyword Suggestion Tool - Offers options to
search Overture and Wordtracker data.
SEO Book Keyword
suggestion tool– free and powered by Wordtracker’s API. The tool
offers rough suggested daily search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo!, and
MSN and links to vertical databases like Topix, Google blog search and
Del.icio.us. It also links to Google Trends, Google Suggest and others to give
you a more in depth analysis.
Iota Web -
With the ability to search a growing database of tens of thousands of
high-dollar AdSense keywords, Iotaweb allows publishers to find the keywords
and key phrases that will allow them to focus their content to monetize their
site most effectively.
Keyword
Difficulty by SEOmoz.org
-
Analyzes the competitive landscape of a particular search term or phrase. This
tool issues a percentage score and provides a detailed analysis of the top
ranking sites at Google and Yahoo.
7search
-
7Search.com has been a leading pay per click search engine advertising and
affiliate network since our inception in 1999 and is dedicated to providing
value and service for online businesses. Continually recognized as a premier
online advertising solution and a respected Web partner network, 7Search has
provided thousands of Web businesses with an economical and measurable
opportunity to obtain Internet traffic and generate revenue through their
online presence. Data from 7Search.com queries: 7search.com receives, on
average, 1.5 billion searches per month.
SEO Digger - SEO Digger is a Great tool to do competition keyword
research. Just enter any url and SEO Digger will tell you for what keywords, the
site is ranking at what position in Google. The data may be little outdated but
still it do remarkable job.
Free
Keyword Phrases List Generator
to help you generate a list of keywords, Aaron Wall offers this , which is a web based software that
allows generating a large number of keyword phrases based on permutations of
keywords entered.
Good
Keywords v3 – downloadable Windows software (freeware) meant to
help you get more out of your Google Keyword research. The developer Softnik
Technologies claims that the software does not abuse Google’s resources in
anyway.
Free Search
Term Suggestion Tool from Trellian KeywordDiscovery can generate
maximum 100 keywords and it was developed as an alternative to Overture. Data is
collected from over 200 search engines worldwide. KeywordDiscovery also offers
language specific databases.
SEMRush is a more
powerful tool, that can help you discover competitor sites with common Google
keywords, get a list of Google keywords for any site, investigate long-tail
keywords etc. It its free version the tool offers only 10 listings for each
query. Another drawback is that it only uses Google.com – not ideal for local
keyword research.
KGen is
a FireFox addon that allows you to see what keywords are strong on
visited web pages. This is a great tool to use to analyze competitor sites. It
allows you to select some words and transfer them to your clipboard and paste
them on tag fields on your favorite social network or fill meta-keywords of your
web pages.
Demographics Prediction is a tool designed by Microsoft to help you
gather users’ age, gender, and other demographic information based on their
online behavior (search queries and visited sites).
At the beginning, I told you to forget about keyword density
for a good reason: Google is now analyzing keywords within the context they are
place in, looking at semantically related terms like synonyms and other words
related to the key-phrase used in search. The process is called latent semantic
indexing, and it’s been around since 2005. Pages over optimized for one single
keyword phrase are often being filtered out by Google for being “over
optimized”, whereas pages that use a wide array of related terms have more
stable rankings for the core keyword, and might rank for the related terms too.
Other web based
Keyword Research Tools
Google
Search Suggest - I am not sure many have realized this but this is
super fast way to get related keyword searches for any keyword. Google not
only suggest the keywords but also suggest the number of searched made.
MSN
Adcenter Keyword Tools - Microsoft is offering some nice set of
keyword tools which are worth looking at.
Google Sets -
Google Sets is an excellent tool for people who are looking for related root
keywords.
Google Related Keywords - This tool is Ontology based which finds
Related Keywords just like google sets.
Keyword Research tool - This tool searches the top serps pages for
the given keyword and find the kind of keywords they are having. The suggest
may go little wrong but sometime but whatever I have seen so far, it looked
pretty effective to me.
Keyword Data Miner Tool - Well right now the tool is not working
for some reason but I have seen it people using it. I will again check later
if that tools works and if it don’t, I will remove the link..
Check out
keyword brainstorming tools (term clustering and related
terms):
Google Sets : Related terms (i.e. terms that are likely to appear in lists).
MSN clustering tool : Word clusters (keyword phrases).
Searchradar
: Tag clouds and keyword definitions.
Keyword Map
:
Related terms (synonyms and keyword phrases).
Urban
Dictionary : Related terms (related synonyms and urban words).
Here are some tools to help you select semantically related terms:
Keyword Map helps you
find both synonyms and some popular keyword phrases.
Urban dictionary
allows you to find slang terms, and definitions written by volunteers.
Synonym.com
is a good synonyms finder.
Keyword
Questions – people type questions in the search engines and this is
a tool that helps you find them. Answering to these questions will most likely
deliver more traffic to your site. The tool is great for long-tail optimization
purposes.
Check what your competitors are optimizing for:
Ranks,
SEOworkers and
RankQuest will report on any site keywords used in title and meta tags,
headings, alternative and anchor text, and overall content.
Check which anchor text people are using to link to your
competitors. Here is the list of backlink checkers that explore
backlinks anchor text:
BacklinkWatch,
Smart backlinks,
Analyze Back
Links and
Link
Diagnosis.
Keyword Tools
suggesting Trends
eBay Pulse - Shows
daily keywords trends that are hot on eBay,useful for research.
Yahoo! Buzz
- Shows search keywords that are hot on a given day on Yahoo! Search..
Google Hot
Trends - Shows keywords that are recently hot and also archives
them
Google Trends
- Shows seasonal search trends for most popular keywords.
Google
Zeitgeist - Google Zeitgeist (geez, should have used a better
name…) is a set of tools from google using which you can get past results. So
you can know what keywords were hot last month or last summer.
AOL Search Hot Searches - Just like all other search engines, AOL
also offers what keywords are searched most.
Ask
Jeeves Interesting Queries - Ask jeeves also showing most searched
keywords.
Lycos Hot 50 - Lycos too!
List of Desktop
Keyword Research Softwares
Good Keywords
- I had saw this tool in 2006 and immediately fall in love with it. Its a
great small free software which suggest keywords, build keyword lists as well
as suggest typo keywords.
Keyword Spider
Free desktop software that gathers tons of keywords from other people’s
websites using sneaky spider technology (that is what their site says… not
me).
Keyword Tumble
A free keyword research marketing tool that takes your existing keyword
phrase and generates multiple variations of it, simply by mixing the words
in each keyword phrase around.
Traffic Travis - Provides a huge complement of SEO research and
page analysis tools, as well as a powerful host of PPC research and
monitoring tools. Regardless of whether you're building a website for search
engine optimization or pay-per-click, Traffic Travis is an indispensable
research tool: tracking your own site's performance, and peeking under the
hood of your competitors' sites as well.
IBP - I
have used IBP in the past and can say its a good software (albeit very costly)
for keyword research, specially if you are an organization.
SEO Elite - Its
NOT free and I have heard mixed reviews about it but if you have spare money
than it may be worth trying for.
Social media can help you see the keywords of the moment: use
Twitter Search and
Twitscoop to see real
time keywords,
Deli.cio.us
will show you an array of related terms. Even
Facebook can
help you trace keyword popularity within the network by showing you how often a
certain term is mentioned across FB walls.
SiteVolume
compares up to 5 terms buzz over at Twitter (and also Digg, Myspace,
Youtube and Flickr) - the results are pulled from Google [site:]
search.
Technorati Keywords Charts - Chart the blog keyword mentions
with an embeddable chart.
Twist - Like
Google Trends for Twitter.
Spy - Spy tracks real-time keyword mentions in Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, Blog
Comments, Yahoo News, Blogs and
Google Reader and allows you to subscribe via RSS.
Don’t forget that
dictionaries, encyclopedias and
thesaurus can
be of great help in your keyword research efforts as well. For example,
MetaGlossary
harvests definitions from the entire web.
User Intent: Wouldn’t it
be nice to be able to know a user’s intent when searching? Well it appears
some providers are getting close to answering this for us.
Online Commercial Intention: MSN is the first to break ground on
what will be the next frontier—understanding user intent. They break down
search into two simple segments, those who are looking for information and
those who are looking to purchase. This tool can detect customer intent to
acquire information or to purchase products based on their search queries or
recently visited URLs.
Good research is the result of using the right methods and tools in preparing
for any SEO task. This is especially true for keyword insertion. With the
suggestions I have provided, and a little time spent developing the right
strategies and combinations of tools, anyone can not only write successful SEO
copy, but write compelling content for their readers as well.
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