If you are a web developer or even a beginner at web design, you know that search engine optimization is the key to a successful web presence. The words and phrases that make up the content portion of your site are critical to how well your site will rank within the top three search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. If you can afford to do it, you can use paid keyword research tools such as Wordtracker.com and Wordze.com. However, there are free tools available that can be, in some instances, as good as the paid version.
There are those in the development community who "balk" as the use of free resources and feel that they are ineffective for several reasons. One of the biggest objections to the use of free tools is that their findings are not a reliable reflection of the latest search data.
Additional complaints include not being able to find a massive amount of "long tail" keywords for the product or website niche you are pursing. For example, lets take a keyword like "web hosting". If you perform a simple search for that term you will find about 134,000,000 pages in the Google index that have been optimized for that keyword.
If you were to design a web site specializing in web hosting, the chances of your newly hatched site being found in the top ten listings of Google will probably be low. It would take a lot of time, money, and effort to even starting ranking in the top 100 search engine results, much less the top ten.
Long tail, or related keywords within the same category such as "affordable web hosting", only returns a little over 3,000,000 web pages. With the right design structure, your site could rank much higher, in a shorter period of time, then you could with the term "web hosting".
Creating pages or websites around lower searched and less competitive terms will increase your odds of rising in the search engine ranks. However, everyone's "keyword needs" are different. Not everyone will need thousands of different words, phrases, or long tail keywords to obtain the organic search engine traffic they need from Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Some, might want to only rank for a few well placed product keywords and will spend time building a site around them despite the competition. Others might start out designing their websites knowing that the keywords they will pursue don't have much competition to begin with. As mentioned, there are extensive opinions throughout cyberspace about the proper way to approach keyword research.
I really don't want to debate methods and practices of site design, because that is not the focus of this article. If you want to find out more about developing a website properly, then I would go to Charles Heflin's website and download the Master Plan for free. Charles provides simple and practical advice on how to design a site .
The center of this article is based around sharing with you a few keyword tools that I feel can get pretty close to the fee based models. Our first tool is a company who commands over 60% of the search engine market today. If you haven't guessed it by now, this keyword research tool comes from non other then Google. Google Insight For Search,is truly an innovation in search technology.
When you land on the Insight web portal, it presents you with several interesting research options. Want to know how a popular a particular search term was "back in the day"? Google Insight provides you with an "interest over time" graph that charts keywords as far back as 2004. Google's Insight also reveals which city, state, region, or country has the highest amount of searches for the search term of choice. This is extremely valuable if you are geographically targeting a keyword within your state, region, or town.
Once you set up the parameters and initiate the search, you will be provided with some incredible information about your keyword. The first of which is the volume of searches for your keyword of choice. Articles snippets relating to your keyword, as well as the countries and regions around the world where the search for that particular term is the heaviest. You will also see the top searched words and phrases as well as a list of "rising searches" for related keywords that have increased over a specific time period. Probably one of the most valuable free tools on the Internet today for conducting
Even though Insight provides more then enough information to get you started, Google provides yet another research gem that cannot be overlooked. Called the Google Adwords Keyword tool, it is basically used for people who are going to set up an advertising campaign using Google adwords. But, for our purposes it can be used to help you in a few ways. Lets say you are having problems finding keyword that best describe you site, or you want to rank for.
You might only have a few words or phrases in mind, but would like find a lot more. If you plug them into the Adwords tool you will get a list of "additional keywords to consider" if you set the search parameter for "broad" search. You can also find out the number of keywords that are on a competitors site by using the "website content" feature listed on the front page. Type in any website and Google will tell you the keywords that appear the most on that particular site. The volume of searches for any particular month is also included when using the Adwords tool.
Our last tool is not from Google, but will round out our keyword research efforts nicely. Seodigger.com is another fabulous web creation that does one very simple thing. You can enter any URL into SEOdigger to find which of your competitors keywords rank high enough to be listed within Google’s top 20 search results. So, before you pay any service to start searching for keywords, consider these three first. They say the best things in life are free. These are the best free keyword research tools on the Web today..
