Keyword research and tools, P II
I think I should cover a few more keyword research aspects, so I have written this succession post of my original Keyword research and tools, PI.
As I know two most popular keyword research tools with webmasters are:
Overture Keyword Selctor Tool and
Wordtracker
(I personally prefer Aaron Wall’s Keyword suggestion tool)
If you have some experience of working with both Overture and WordTracker tools you should have noticed a great difference in the search volume for the same keyphrases. Overture displays much higher number of searches and for some time I could not understand how it can be.
I was inclined to trust Overture as they are the property of Yahoo! and in my opinion should have access to the search information of the company. And it is obvious - to see higher search volume for the phrases you are about to optimize your website – it is something I would like to believe.
But my estimation turned to be wrong. WordTracker posted an article where they explained that great discrepancy of search volume in this way:
Overture numbers are not correct because of:
- artificial searches (automated queries – monitoring rankings, optimizing bids, etc)
- duplicate searches (Yahoo! provides a few search engines and portals with primary/ secondary search results – one person can make one search using a few search engines with Yahoo! search results)
- plurals and singulars (Overture does not count these searches as separate)
- there were a few more reasons, but these three are most significant
I should admit this sounds credible. So if you are not sure what numbers to trust I recommend trusting WordTracker’s.
Keyword competition indicators should help you to see if your chances to rank well for these keyphrase are good.
For this purpose you can use Keyword difficulty tool. But more popular methods (you can use them in combination with Keyword difficulty tool):
1. RIS – amount of searches vs. number of pages with keyphrase
2. KEI – keyword effectiveness index. Actually it is similar to RIS, but WordTracker uses KEI for its reports (WordTracker uses these indicators: KEI under 100 – bad keyword phrase, above 100 – good, above 400 – great).
3. Popularity * Relevancy. This is the method that Dan Thies (keyword research guru) advocates. He says that not all searches (popularity) are relevant to your website. You should define % of relevant searches and apply that amount of searches as a popularity indicator. Though it sounds quite reasonable I am not sure how to make sure what % of searches is relevant. Dan Thies has some tables and explanations on his company website, so if interested you can explore this approach deeper.
Summary: It was my second, but not the last post on keyword research. I would like to finish this short series with a post on high paying keywords. I think the phrase is self explanatory. Where to get those high paying keywords list (preferably for free)? I will post a few resources. To tell the truth I am not the one who chases after these lists – I have had some experience and discovered that there are millions smart people of my kind and it is very hard to compete against all them.
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[tags]keywords tools, keywords research, traffic, links bait, social bookmarking, web 2.0, domain names, text-link-ads, links buying, myspace, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, blogs, content generation, google, make money online, work from home, home based job, duplicate content, earn your living online[/tags]
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