Choosing and Researching Keywords, concluded - Online Tools: Some Caveats
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In my previous article, I mentioned WordTracker and Overture as highly useful tools for researching keyword data. Please keep in mind that they will tell you relative keyword data. This alone is useful, but it is not the full story. They can be highly inaccurate when compared to the actual number of searches performed for particular keywords. In other words, the tools will help you to select which terms to target, but they won't help you accurately predict the amount of traffic you can achieve from using those keywords. For that information, you can use programs from Google's AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.
WordTracker and Overture also have other limitations of which you need to be aware. WordTracker separates terms and phrases by capitalization, plurality and word ordering. Overture, however, does not. For example, WordTracker might show different numbers for the phrases "car loans," "Car Loans," "car loan" and "cars Loan," but Overture would see no difference between all these phrase and lump them all together. Plurals do sometimes deliver different results in the search engines. Changes in word ordering also deliver different results. But capitalization, or its lack, is much less important; most search engines don't take notice of capitalization.
Incidentally, Overture has also been known to lump in misspellings. If that seems peculiar, remember that Overture is a paid search engine. An advertiser bidding on a term will show up not only on the term itself, but its misspellings. This may be great for PPC marketing on Overture, but you can see why you wouldn't want to base your entire SEO campaign on these results.
There is a small caveat to using WordTracker, as well. In the previous article, I mentioned WordTracker's Keyword Effectiveness Index, or KEI. WordTracker says that "Good keywords to target have a KEI of between 10-100. These are good value bets and you have a good to medium chance of reaching the top. Between 100-400 are your best bets and anything above 400+ is a gift!" This isn't always true, however. Search engine optimizer Gerard Manning used WordTracker's KEI formula on the word "Microsoft," and came up with a KEI of 61047.484. So Microsoft should be a great word to use, right? Well, given that Google finds that term on 720 million sites, I'd say there is far too much competition to consider that a good term.
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