No Comments Written by Robert on July 30, 2008 – 12:18 am

Wordtracker, located at www.wordtracker.com, offers a useful keyword suggestion tool that comes in free or subscription-fee versions. Similar in functionality to Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker provides you with a list of related keywords and the estimated search volume for each keyword. Wordtracker collects search volume data from two search engines, dogpile.com and metacrawler.com. Together, these engines account for roughly 3.5 million searches per day. Given the large size of the Wordtracker database, search volume estimates have proven to be fairly reliable and should provide you with a good idea of the kind of volume a given keyword generates across various search engines.

Wordtracker breaks search volume estimates down into daily figures, as opposed to the monthly numbers the Keyword Discovery Global Premium Database provides. Having quick access to the daily number of searches for your potential keywords can prove critical when deciding what keywords to target in your SEO efforts. You can rank in the number-one position for a keyword, but if no one is searching for that keyword, you will not receive any traffic from that top ranking. Before you begin building your site, you should always do extensive keyword research to ensure you are targeting realistic rankings that bring you valuable traffic.

Doing extensive keyword research also provides valuable insight into the online behavior of your potential customers. The keywords with high search volume are the most common ways your audience is currently talking about your product or service. Listen to them, and build your site around the terms they already use. Taking this reverse engineering approach to building content ensures that you can successfully reach your target audience in the most efficient way possible.

The free version of the Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool is limited to 100 results per search. However, the paid version gives you instant access to thousands of keywords, which can prove invaluable when building out large keyword lists for running a PPC account and when searching for supplemental keywords to use when constructing your content pages for SEO purposes.

Another benefit of signing up for the paid version of Wordtracker is the ability to import a list of keywords and check their search volume. Instead of manually entering each keyword into the free tool one at a time, all you need to do is copy and paste your list into the paid version of the tool; with one click you get the search volume estimates for every word. This alone can save you hours of time each month. As with Keyword Discovery, the paid version of Wordtracker also allows you to save your keyword projects for easy access later on down the road. This feature allows you not only to work ahead, but also to build your own expandable database of valuable keyword research.

Using the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool

The Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool, located at https://adwords.google.com/select/ KeywordToolExternal, is a free tool offered by Google that generates keywords based on a user entering descriptive words or phrases or a Web site URL. Because Google provides this tool, it has the unique advantage of being able to display a measure of advertiser competition.

Advertiser competition is in reference to the amount of advertisers bidding on each term within the Google AdWords program. This is helpful in finding new keywords for use in your own PPC account, because the search volume appears right next to the advertiser competition. Keywords that have a fairly high search volume with a low competition rating can make perfect additions to your own keyword lists. The Google Keyword Suggestion Tool also shows seasonal trends in keyword searches. This is useful for planning your SEO campaigns. You should always target keywords with a mix of seasonal and constant search volume.

You should also begin your link-building efforts for your targeted seasonal terms at least six months before the period of peak search volume. This ensures that you are ranked as highly as possible for those high volume periods.

Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool provides you not only with a list of potential keywords to target in your PPC or SEO efforts, but also with a list of potential negative keywords. Negative keywords are essential when putting together a PPC campaign. Your negative keywords are the words that prevent your ad from being triggered for display.

The most commonly added negative keyword is “free,” because most advertisers do not want their products shown to someone who is searching for something free. However, there are also other keywords that may prove to be useful as negatives that you may initially overlook. For example, the word “picture” is often associated with popular e-commerce terms. If you have a sporting goods business and bid on keywords such as “football” and “baseball,” you should use “picture” as a negative keyword because there is a low probability that the keywords “picture of football” or “baseball picture” would convert into a sale.

The Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool provides the option of finding keywords related to the content of any Web page. This is very useful for analyzing keywords that your competition targets. However, a less obvious use for this tool lies in optimizing your own page content. By publishing your Web site to the Web and then looking for site-related keywords with the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, you get a clear look at the way Google is interpreting your page content. After generating a list of keywords, you have the option of saving your list in multiple formats. You can save your list as a text file, a CSV file, or a CSV file preformatted for Microsoft Excel.

Alternatively, if you are already running a Google AdWords PPC campaign, you can add the keywords directly into your Google AdWords account. The data from the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool is primarily used to add keywords to PPC campaigns; however, the tool can be extremely valuable during your keyword generation efforts for SEO purposes. The Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool allows you to gauge search volume and competition, and see exactly how Google interprets your content, which can be incredibly useful for creating, and tweaking, your Web site content.