One of the first steps in search engine optimization or “SEO” is to research what keywords you need to target in order to begin building or buying traffic.
If you are going to build traffic, you need try to locate a good mix of keywords and phrases, maybe 10-15 that apply to your business or service. Make sure the keywords aren’t too broad or competitive (example; an art gallery should not optimize for the keyword “art”) and also make sure the keywords have enough traffic to warrant spending time optimizing/setting up CPC campaigns.
The same advice goes for people looking to buy traffic using Google AdWords or a competitive service from Yahoo/MSN. The broad and competitive keywords will be the most expensive and least profitable for you as they will most likely not be targeted specifically at your business. The only exception maybe being competitive keywords with low volume that price themselves out of profitability by head to head competition or high profit margins.
There are several free tools out there to help you find these keywords and determine which ones apply to you.
1. The first keyword research tool comes from SEO Book dot com and offers a database that is based on all the other top keyword databases such as Overture/Yahoo, Google and WordTracker. The great thing about SEO Book’s Tool is that it combines all these separate tools into one, and provides additional data in the results such as links to Google services like Trends, Estimator, and Suggest. These additional tools and fast speed really set this tool out from the others.
2. Google provides it’s own search volume tool that is pretty quick on it’s toes and provides some valuable information straight from a trusted source: Google itself. However, the service is meant to sell you keywords (so beware), and is somewhat basic compared to offering from SEO Book. Plus the CAPTCHA verification is annoying.
3. An oldy but a goody, Overture’s keyword inventory tool is simple and to the point. However it frequently goes down so you may find yourself venturing off to a competitor to do your keyword research.
*/Yes the screenshot is intended to show a 404, as I mentioned in the description, the site has troubles keeping it’s crap together.
4. Coming in last but certainly not least comes WordTracker’s free keyword suggestion tool, not to be confused with their pay service which offers a lot more features. Another very simple interface, WordTracker offers up data from only a limited set however, as explained on their site:
* Every day, on average, we collect about 4.13 million search terms from Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com, who according to Netapplications.com account for 0.63% of searches across all engines. By combining these two figures, we estimate that the total daily searches across all engines is 655.7 million.
It’s still a lot of searches and the data remains consistent with the tools above so it’s still a wise choice.
Overall you want to do your research and try a few of the services above in order to get a nice wide sample of data and find a service/interface you like. Find the keywords that have just the right amount of traffic, and the right amount of competition so that you don’t waste your time going after keywords that won’t give you the highest profit.
BONUS: SEO Book dot com provides an embeddable search form that I’ve pasted below: