Keyword Research Tools

By Mark Quirk

Internet Marketers know the importance of keywords.  Whether its optimizing pages on your site for search ranking, working with partners to include links, serving Google AdSense type ads or running your Google AdWords style adverts - keywords are it.

Oh, by the way, one common, understandable, misconception is that keywords are single words.  In reality, when we're talking about keywords - we really mean the keywords or phrases.  For example the keywords or phrases that users might use to search for your content.

Now, the internet is made up of millions of web sites (more than 80 million the last time I checked the statistics at Netcraft) and literally, billions of pages.  If you are going to do any kind of keyword analysis on the internet, you're going to need tools to help you!  That's what this article is about.  Below I describe two categories of tools, those that are free and those that aren't free but are worth investing in.

Free Tools

If you're just starting out - you'll want to investigate the free tools that are available to help web masters and internet marketers - there are lots of them!  I'm going to suggest a few that I've used and found useful.

The most obvious starting point, given that its the search engines that define this market, is the engines themselves!

This third tool from Pixelfast Web Design uses Overture's keyword tool for research, and also returns current adverts for the keyword you enter - brilliant for checking out real examples of adverts in your area of interest.

My last two suggestions in the free tools space are a little more comprehensive.  The first is a client application you'll need to download and the second is a web site and all it contains are tools for web masters!

I particularly like the keyword analysis tool - its so simple, just listing all of the words on your site ordered by the number of times they are used.

Valuable Tools

There are just three tools I'm going to suggest here - and they are in two categories: client tools and keyword aggregators.  If you're serious about marketing your products on the internet these tools are invaluable!

- Client Tools

Well, I say 'tools' I'm actually going to suggest just one tool - Keyword Elite.  This tool was released in 2006 by the same company that brought us SEO Elite.  I bought the tool in April 2006 and straight away I was able to optimize one of my Google AdWords campaigns using the information I discovered in 10 minutes - amazing.  The tool provides five categories of keyword analysis:

  • Keyword List Generation
  • Analyse Pay Per Click Listings - a great way to do niche market research
  • Use pre-built keyword list
  • Analyse Keyword Competition - find sites that rank well for your desired keywords
  • Spy on Your AdWords Competition - find out who else is paying for ads with specific keywords and how much they're paying!

So, take a look at Keyword Elite.

- Keyword Aggregators

There are two well known and credible organisations, that I'm familiar with, that amongst other things aggregate the searches done across all the major search engines, every day, and provide great analysis tools for you to research and use that list.  For example you can enter your keywords and they will provide not only the many variations on those keywords, but exactly how many searches have been done for those keywords.  These tools are incredible.  I've personally used Wordtracker and found it incredibly valuable.  So here they are:

The great news is that if you have a Wordtracker account or a KeywordDiscovery account, Keyword Elite can take advantage of your membership to increase its functionality.

Copyright 2006 Mark Quirk, All Right Reserved.

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