Choosing Keywords Wisely - Go for Value
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The next stage is to judge how much value each of the words and phrases on your list have as search terms. To do this, you can enlist the help of free or fee-based online services or applications.
Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/) is the biggest and possibly most respected keyword research tool. They have an extensive keyword database (over 300 million searches over the last 90 days) into which you enter search terms to see how often people search for those terms and how many competing sites are using the keywords. Wordtracker also provides tools that can help you add to your list of potential keywords. The many benefits of Wordtracker come at a price, with daily, weekly, monthly or yearly subscriptions starting at $7.65 (£4.20) per day and going up to $254.84 (£140) per year.
KeywordDiscovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com) is a rival to Wordtracker. For a slightly higher average monthly subscription rate, they offer a larger database of search terms over a yearly seasonal trend analysis, as opposed to Wordtracker's 90 day trend window. Like Wordtracker, they offer statistics on misspellings and fuzzy string searches, related searches and a thesaurus search. KeywordDiscovery also provide results on phonetic matches, keyword translation and keyword permutations.
Google AdWords provide a keyword generation tool at http://adwords.google.com/ to help you choose keyword variations. The system is designed for use in an Adwords campaign and obviously only covers data on keyword popularity on Google, but you can also use it to help check for keywords you may not have thought of, or to help weed out what you may have thought of as strong keywords that in actual fact are used relatively infrequently.
Once you have narrowed down your list to almost the final draft, containing just the keywords that you are definitely going to use, you should enter each of them into the popular search engines to see what sites they turn up. Do they return sites the sell or provide products or services similar to your own? Or do they generate results completely different from what you would have expected? If they turn up sites that differ vastly from your own, when people want to find your site, they probably won’t use those terms. That means they can be removed from your master list.
Next: Time for a Rewrite >>
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