Keyword Research Tools and Tips

There are a handful of data-centres that you can use to discover how many people carrying out keyword research. It's important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the information you glean from these services, because if you take the research results on face value, you could end up with skewed results that will waste your time and effort. On this lens, I'll walk you through the various datacentres and the tools that use them. Please feel free to ask any questions you might have, using my guest book below.

Glenn Leader

Probably the Big Daddy of all search volume tools is the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool, which is now owned by Yahoo. There are many keyword research tools that exploit the Overture Database, and they'll be discussed below. This list isn't exhaustive, and I'll add to this list as time goes by.

When you enter a root keyword into tools that use the Overture Database, the chances are that the tool will return the top one hundred results. This is because Overture caps the results at this level. Many keyword research tools have a dig facility that will allow you to carry out deeper research for a specific keyword. This function is great for finding niches within niches. Digging will be discussed in more detail a little later on.

It's not all beer and skittles. There are a few problems with the results returned from Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool.

Raw data is return with the keywords within the phrase are rearranged in alphabetical order. For example, let's take 'concrete sealer' as a root keyword. The top five returned results are

concrete sealer
concrete floor sealer
concrete counter sealer top
concrete driveway sealer
behr concrete sealer
concrete sealer stamped

A few of those results look fine, concrete floor sealer for example, but this is simply luck. The actual words within the phrase were already in alphabetic order. But if you examine the others, you'll notice that few of them actually read well. Trying to write articles and content is going to be very difficult and still make them read well unless you rearrange the words so that they make sense.

Every time somebody uses the system to carry out keyword research, that keyword is added to their database. Of course you only want results of surfers looking for information, not results with Keyword researcher's quires.

As of this posting, Overture has stopped updating their database. The results today (early July 2007) are over six months out of date. This is a big problem. So I only use Overture Search volume results as an indicator. As you'll see later, there are many searches on keyword phrases that are seasonal. Most keywords have a search volume 'trend'

One of the best free tools for searching and helping you organise your keyword research is Good Keywords. This program uses the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool to grab it's data. In this article, I'll be using this tool to show you how to determine if a keyword is worth investigating further. The niche I'll be using for this tutorial is 'contact lenses'.

I assume you've downloaded and installed Good Keywords. Watch the video below as I walk through mining enough good keywords to work with.

Video to follow in a few days...