Some people love building sites, some people love statistics and others like to write pages and pages of content. I don’t.

I like to get a keyword, build a wham bang mini site and move on. That’s the reason I am such a fan of Commission Ritual. Brian also put me onto a free tool that is really useful and something I have set up on my computer which does not involve any real work from me.

If you are building mini sites, the object is to build, move on, build, move on but it is helpful to know what’s working and what isn’t and that is where the Rank Checker tool comes in. This is a FireFox plug-in that will grab data on how well a site is ranking for a certain keyword or phrase.

Firefox is the best web browser, get it here

Here is a video explaining what SEO Rank Checker is and how to use it properly.

When you have this little tool up and running it is simple to keep an eye on how your keywords are performing. Why would you want to do this?

As I said, build, move on, but to go on blindly may be costing you visitors and more importantly the sales that those visitors make. Here’s why, some keywords will flourish and grow for you, some will die, it’s the nature of the method but in between will be some that will need just a little more attention than others.

When you use Rankchecker you can see the positions in the SERPS of your chosen keyword, now, if you have one at number fifty well hey ho! we’ll leave it a bit longer, but if you have one that is at number 12, 13, 14 etc you are nearly on page 1. This is the keyword to lavish a bit of love on, with a couple of backlinks you can almost certainly give it that little extra push.

Page 1 on the search engines is where it happens and so if you can get there with a backlink or two it is so worth it for the extra visitors, and extra sales

Related posts:

1. Keyword Research & Page Rank

He wrote “This program (MNF) is complete crap! Its a scam! The figures are totally imaginary, I have checked keyword after keyword between micronichecrap and google and none of them match up, total waste of time!!!!!!” and so on.

Frankly, it was an impressive email stretching to 800 words. If he had spent that time productively he would have had a nice article instead! Ha,Ha.

I’m pleased to say we are now back to being friends. The problem he had, and believe me we all have it at one time or another, was, he didn’t read the manual!

Micronichefinder will return a number  for  “exact phrase count” which is the number of pages on Google for a given keyword. This phrase is searched by the program which asks for the result in 100 returns at a time.

Now, Google on your computer has a default setting of 10 results per page, this is a speed issue, however you can reset this through the search settings at the top of the page. Now try this, search for a phrase,  I used “braun electric razors”

MNF returned a count of 44 pages with that exact phrase, but when I went to Google I found it said :

But when I changed the search settings I got:

So, be careful when comparing any results that you are actually comparing like for like.

The other message I have had was regarding the MOB function. This number is the “Measure of Backlinks” and represents an idea of how many backlinks would be required to get on page one of Google. Now there is more to getting page one than backlinks but it does give a good idea of what competition you are up against.

I am not going to bore you with a great long explanation but will point you to a video which explains exactly what the MOB feature is.

Find out more about MicronicheFinder

Related posts:

1. Finding The Golden Keyword
2. More Keyword Research
3. Does Google Need Our Content? Part 2

This is just a short post to put together a list of free keyword tools. There are lots of places to get keywords and it is essential that you put in the time to refine your keyword lists.

Having a spreadsheet to record your keywords makes life a whole lot easier and so I suggest you start a keyword master file that you can update and modify as those all important keyword phrases come in.

To start with the main free keyword tools are:

Free Wordtracker

Keyword Discovery

Google Adwords Tool

Ebays Popular Search Terms

Paypal Shops Finding products to promote

Shopping.com Find out what people are looking to buy

Googles Search Based Tool

All these tools can be used to discover keywords that are being punched into search engines every day. Do not become to hung up on search counts as long as there are more than about twenty per day you can still be making money.

It is the long tail keywords that are easiest to rank for, say phrases between three and six words as these are generally people in the buying phase of research.

Someone who types in “Red widgets” is usually looking for information and are in the pre-buy mode but someone who searches for mink fur red widget is normally looking to buy. They have done their research and have decided that they want a mink fur red widget and so will buy.

It is far better and much more profitable to be ranked on the first page of Google for a keyword with twenty searches a day than it is to be on page forty for a term with 1000 searches.

The money is often in the detail and so if you are promoting a niche product it will serve you better to write content around a particular term than try to encompass a whole niche at once.

For instance if you have a site pushing golf putters break it down into types of putter, mallet, half mallet, blade, belly putter, and then break it down further, Adams belly putters, Cleveland belly putters, Titleist belly putter and then break it down again, Adams 1201 belly putter, Adams 471 belly putter etc, etc.

The search count for an Adams 1201 belly putter may only be two a day but add that to two for the 471 and so on and you start to have a site with a large searching audience and more importantly a buying audience.

By using the free keyword tools you can easily break down any niche into a very profitable bunch of keywords and the site will almost build itself as you write small articles, one per keyword,  on each item and load them onto your pages.

PS. I made up the model numbers but you get the idea.

Related posts:

1. Keyword Tools I Use Part 1
2. Keyword Research & Page Rank
3. More Keyword Research

There are numerous keyword research tools available some free, some very expensive but the cost or otherwise is not neccesarily an indicator of how good they are. I use several different things to help me decide which keywords to target.

The Google Keyword Tool

This is a good first choice if you are starting out. Although free it will give you a headstart in the search for keywords that you may not of thought of yourself. The drawback is that you then have to flip backwards and forwards between the keyword tool and the search pages to get the competition numbers. The Google Keyword Tool is here

Mozilla Firefox and SEO Extension.

If you use the  Google Keyword Tool the Firefox browser with the SEO extension is a must. It allows you to get so much information at one place it is priceless. Firefox and SEO

Those are the free tools and they have their place on your computer however if you intend to get serious there are some paid tools which are worth considering. The best thing about them is not the information that they get you, you can get that for free as I have said, the best reason for buying them is the enormous amount of time that they can save.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a subscription tool that charges a monthly fee for access. It is a very popular keyword research tool for affiliate marketing and avoids the pitfalls of many desktop based tools in that you are using their bandwidth and proxy servers. You have a variety of tools in one and it is quite quick, the drawback for me was the monthly fee. If you are researching keywords a lot then this is a great tool and worth the money. Personally I look for a bunch of keywords in one go and then concentrate on content so I wasn’t using it to the full, however if you are into bum marketing or article writing this is heartily recommended. Find out about the free trial here

Microniche Finder

This is my favourite keyword tool at the moment. There, I said it, for the price this research tool is incredible. I am an affiliate niche marketer at heart and MNF allows you to get to keywords and search terms so quickly it is worth twice the price in my opinion. This is a one off payment keyword research tool that sits on your computer,I will be putting some posts up about how to get the most out of it but in the meantime check it out here.

Keyword Elite

In my opinion-Don’t bother! Sometimes hype and advertising overcome actual product. Think Windows v Mac, if your’e old enough think VHS v. Betamax. I did use this keyword tool for some time and occasionally it worked very well, but, most of the time it locked up, required captcha codes to be entered every 30 seconds and frequently got me banned by Google. This very expensive tool in my opinion is a waste of time.

Related posts:

1. Keyword Research & Page Rank
2. Free Keyword Tools
3. Finding The Golden Keyword