Following up on 1 of my questions from the previous post, using a couple of keyword research tools will help you find how much SE traffic is floating about, as well as how much of the long tail you can make use of for your new niche blog.
Keyword tools
Why use them? If you are starting a niche blog like I will be soon, you need to find out how much SE traffic you possibly can tap into. Why SE traffic you ask? This is the money making traffic. Regular blog and RSS readers form part of your community that grows your site, but its the SE traffic who buy your affiliated products and click on your ads.
Here are 3 free keyword research tools I use:
Overture
Who hasn’t heard of Overture!? It normally is the first stop for most SEO people. It lists related searches that include your keyword and the estimated number of times that keyword was searched on in the previous month.
Keyword Discovery
Keyword Discovery from Trellian was created to compete with Overture. They only list the top 100 keywords but it is simple and easy to use. They offer a paid for service that will give you more features, if that is something you are after.
SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
Aaron Wall’s SEO Book is a huge seller in the SEO market and his free keyword suggestion tool is top notch. It cross references a couple of keyword tools as well as offering a host more options. I suggest trying out his keyword tool before heading over to Overture or Keyword Discovery.
There is one more tool that might be of use especially if you wanting to get into the Adwords game as well as research keywords and that is Google Adwords Keyword Tool. It doesn’t give you any figures of how many searches are made, but what it does do is show you a small graph on the months Search Volume as well as how much Adwords Competition there is per keyword.
3 responses so far ↓
Andy // May 14, 2007 at 10:28 am
Wordtracker.com I believe is one of the few ways to go in order to find keywords. It’s database contains over 300 million search terms used over the past 90 days. And it splits the number of times that keyword has been used across all major search engines. It also shows the popularity of that keyword which makes it easy to know which keywords are highly competitive and which are niche. Yes you do have to pay, but in terms of pay off from using it, worth every penny because its accurate, unbiased and shows data from those search engines that matter.
Dansko // Sep 11, 2007 at 6:36 am
Overture Suggestion tool was by far the best keyword tool available. But it looks like they have discontinued their product. As Overture search keyword numbers are not updated since January this year.
Now I think SEOBOOK tool is the best one, and I am using it too.
International SEO // Jun 17, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Keyword discovery / Trellian covers several overseas markets (unfortunately not SA though).
That and WordZe are two of the more accurate ones these days.
Then of course there are Google adwords estimates too, Yahoo PPC estimates and MSN estimates if you have an account.
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