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Keyword Research Tools – Your Choices are Critical for Your Pages to Succeed

By admin | March 5, 2008

Keyword research tools are what I would like to cover today.

There is debate in the internet marketing community as to which comes first, keyword selection, or niche selection. Do you find nice keywords first and then find the market and build your site around them, or do you find a niche with a nice hungry market first and then research the keywords relating to that. Personally I am in the latter camp.


But, most of you already have a web site in some particular niche, so I am going to jump straight into how to select your keywords.

You should be steadily adding new content (ie. pages) to your site all the time, even if you only do 1 per week that is fine (thats 50+ pages of new content per year, it adds up steadily).

Why ? Well search engines love content.

If you are going to add a new page of content to your site then it is critical that you select one or 2 keyword combinations to “optimise” that particular page. Nobody will be able to find your new page if it does not get a good position on the search engines, and you will have wasted a lot of your time.

I am not going to get into how you actually optimise a page for a particular keyword combo, that will be the subject for future posts.

One thing that I want everyone to understand is that simply because a particular keyword combination gets tons of searches, it doesn’t mean that you must just choose that and rush on making the page. It may be that particular keyword combo also has so many pages optimised for it already that you do not stand a chance of getting ranked for it.

How to determine the amount of “competition” (ie. the number of pages out on the web that are already optimised for it) that you have for a particular keyword combo is also going to be the subject of a future post.

Today I am only going to show you what tools I use myself for the keyword selection itself.

When it comes to selecting keywords you cannot leave it to chance and just guess what people may be searching for.

You have to pick keywords that people are actually typing into the search engines.

The big problem is that none of the search engines make this information available.

Prior to January of 2007, Overture used to provide a small keyword research tool that could get results from their search database. When Yahoo bought out Overture they elected to not put any further resources into this tool, and it has since died.


My personal keyword selection tool of choice is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If anyone is going to show me what the good keywords are then its going to be the market leader in the field … Google.

The other big advantage is that it is FREE :-)

One of the disadvantages is that they do not give you exact search traffic numbers … but, when you use it you will quickly see that they do give a good indication, and it is trivial to see which are good keywords and which are a waste of time.

Something else I love about this tool is that it will return longer “tail” (ie. more than 2 or 3 word combos) keywords, as well as synonyms. This makes it simple to see keywords that you may not even have thought of, and then you can delve deeper (known as “digging” in the keyword world) into those ones as well looking for more.

Remember : It is usually MUCH easier to get a page ranked on the search engines for longer tail keywords (ie. 5 word combos or more).

Spend some time doing your keyword research, because if you choose rubbish that people are not searching for then you will waste the time you are going to spend making the new page.

Another tool that I use (also has a FREE version) is called WordTracker. They also have paid subscription versions of this service (weekly, monthly and annual) … and the paid version can return a lot more words than the free version. The paid version will also give you “competing pages” results for a lot more search engines.

Wordtracker derives their database (which is very large indeed), from all the searches that are being conducted by searchers on the big meta-search engines like Dogpile, Mamma and Ask. By doing this their results are not being skewed by all the thousands of internet marketers that are typing in the keywords as part of their market research.

I like Wordtracker, and I usually use it in conjunction with Google Keyword Tool to try and get a handle on the actual number of searches. It is also very good at doing “thesaurus” type searches, where it will come up with synonyms that you may not have thought of.

Keyword Discovery is another example of a good keyword research tool. They offer a free version and a paid version. I have used it before and it was well worthwhile.

I think that everyone has heard of Google Adwords and Adsense. Did you know that Microsoft also have a similar (and still fairly new) service called MSN AdCenter. They have a neat little tool on their site (free) called Keyword Forecast. It attempts to give you some metrics on the number of actual searches for some keyword combos, and also a future prediction.

Personally I never put much weight on the actual numbers that it returns … but, I find this tool very useful indeed for “comparision” type tests where (after I have compiled a list of keywords using the other tools already mentioned) I compare the amount of traffic that each keyword combo is expected to get.

As an example, enter the following into it (without the inverted commas) … “travel in south africa;holiday in south africa”

Which one of those keyword combos would you rather build and optimise your page for ?

All the guessing has been removed. You can make informed decisions now based on fact.

Have a play with it and see what you think :-)

There are many other good services around … most are paid ones.


Hopefully you will find plenty of ideas here with these keyword research tools.

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