Free Keyword Tools

Hi

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.

Keyword Tools I Use Part 1

Anybody trying to make money online or just get their web pages seen needs a couple of keyword tools. Here are some I use and one I don’t.

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.

Keyword Research & Page Rank

I would like to expand on the previous post regarding keyword research and the methods of determining the quality of a search term or keyword.

As I said Page Rank is a factor in deciding on whether you want to target a particular keyword.  Now perhaps this is not as clear to you as it is to me, but I have been doing this for quite a while and sometimes forget that other people have not got to the same stage .

When you perform any keyword research part of the equation is the competition and how strong is that competition. If you find a search term that has a lot of searches and few results pages, is that a good keyword?

On the face of it, yes, high search/low results= Good! But there is another factor and that is the PR (page rank) of the sites that are listed in the return. Lets research the term ‘fuzzy red widget’ Hey there are 120,000 searches a month, thats a lot of searches, lots of people want fuzzy red widgets!

Lets say there are only 5000 results for the term ‘fuzzy red widget’, this looks promising but if the PR of each page is between 7 and 10 you will have a lot of trouble getting your page anywhere near them. Remember PR is a measure of importance determined by Google and so a high PR is harder to beat than a low one. It may have 120,000 searches but you will never get any of them.

Lets try again, ‘red hairy widgets’ has 50,000 searches each month and there are 50,000 results. This does not look brilliant, fewer searches and more results. But, hang on, the PR of the sites on the first page never gets above 2, this means that you have a very good chance of beating any one of them. This would get you on the first page with a term that is searched for 50,000 times a month. Excellent!

Before you go checking up on me, the figures above are imaginery.

There is a tool that can speed this whole process up and it is free. The best browser around is Firefox, if you haven’t got it go get it now. You can download it for free here. Once you have that head on over here to get the seo Firefox extension. This allows you to view PR, back links, page links and much more. Once again it is free!