Using Keyword Research Tools

Some days ago we were sitting with Ihor Berehulyak and analysing the website sauti.co.uk based on Plone Content Management System . This site represents the company which provides cheap international calls, corporate telephony solutions, and a full range of Premium Rate Service applications for Media including Television, Radio, and Press. Our task was to get the general idea about this site and find out what keywords would be much- to-be-desired for the site optimization. So, it was a good chance for me to learn more about keyword research. After we've tried several keyword research tools, I decided to look for some theoretical material about things we did in order to check whether my assumptions were correct. Here is the information I was lucky to find out.

Keyword Research is a process of selecting the most “optimum performance” keyword phrases that can help visitors find your site. You may have spent days and months on fine-tuning your web pages for a better ranking with the major search engines, yet it will all amount to a big waste if the right keyword phrases are not targeted. Even if you achieve high search engine rankings, you may not get relevant traffic if you select the wrong keywords. Therefore, the foremost step in any SEO campaign is identifying your target audience and researching what keyword phrases they might be searching in the search engines to locate a site like yours.
A common pitfall is to start the website-optimization exercise with a set of “gut-feel” keyword phrases. Site owners often come up with ‘common sense looking' key phrases, which though look obvious, may not match with the ones your buyers are using as their search term. Facts are sacred in website optimization as they provide the exact data of what people are actually searching for, thus saving you from starting on a wild goose chase.

So, how does one get the facts and the data regarding a particular search term?

There are several online keyword research tools like Wordtracker, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and Overture, which offer data pertaining to your search term. Relying on these search tools to analyze keyword phrase data helps you get a grip on your target audience. By researching all these resources, instead of just one, you can determine which specific keyword phrases are the most popular on all these Web search engines and look for a common denominator. You can also see subtle differences among the engines. Some searches are more popular on one engine than another.

Wordtracker , for instance, is a fee-based service that offers a good search term database and makes searching for keyword related information easy.The database is constantly updated, with the oldest data being removed and replaced with the latest information every week. Although Wordtracker is a paid service for regular use, it offers the benefit of one-day free trial, which can be used to complete your keyword research if you are fairly organized. Competition Search can also be made at Wordtracker for your short-listed terms. Competition Search allows you to ascertain how many web pages exist for these search terms on different search engines.

Overture Search Term Suggestion tool, although intended to offer keyword popularity information to the PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisers, works fairly well to carry out your keyword research. Enter your main search terms and in response Overture lists out all other popular search terms that contain that particular term or phrase along with the popularity count. Overture lists the search terms in order of their popularity, giving numerical count of past one month. What's great, Overture searches not only Overture's database but WorkTracker also! It looks like the same tool but the results in the search term field is an anchor text that opens up a whole new set of data and word mining possibilities. In the new set of data it tells you how many times Google and Yahoo find this term on the internet, there is a list of related words which is linked to let you conduct a dictionary.com or thesaurus.reference.com search or to research on one of the related words. Very nice tool, and very useful for copywriters.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool offers some keyword recommendation tools, which can be used as a guide. Google Adwords Keyword Tool provides you with 2 lists of words. Specific keywords that are that include our keyword that have been searched on Google and Similar keywords that are relevant terms searched by uses that searched for your keyword also.

Keyword research is quite important for good search engine results, for findability, and it revolves around the question:

How do you know what words and phrases people use when they search for your product or service?

This is one area where the Internet is so cool, because prior to search engines and keyword research tools like Wordtracker, Overture, and Google Adwords Keyword Tool, you really never had a clue how people thought about your product or service. Do they think of "cellphone" or "cell phone", "mobile phone" or just "cell"? Knowing which is most popular, knowing which is sought more frequently on a search engine, helps you make sure that you're using the right phrases too.