Proper keyword selection is a crucial element of search engine optimization. There are two reasons for this: search volume and competition.
If you think you have come up with a great keyword but nobody searches for it, it will not bring a lot of traffic! If you choose a keyword that people are searching for but it is too competitive, you will find it difficult or impossible to achieve a high ranking.
How do you find a balance? This is what keyword tools are for. But how accurate are they?
The top keyword tools are WordTracker, Google’s own KeywordToolExternal and SEO Books’ Online Keyword Tool. There are also software tools such as Market Samurai that run on your Mac or PC. You may be confused as to which tool to use.
What makes it even harder is the varying results that the different keyword tools may give for a particular keyword: one may show a particular keyword to be excellent while another tool will give a completely different result.
Another question is whether you can get by with the free tools or whether you must invest in a paid tool.
There’s no need to stress. The fact is that we don’t need to know how accurate any of these tools are, since we should use the results they give us only as a general indication of which keywords are most popular for any particular search.
Let’s say a particular keyword phrase — iPad External Keyboard — has a volume of 10,000 searches per month on WordTracker. Assuming that this is a good keyword based on that figure would be premature, but it does give us an idea of that keyword’s search volume.
The next step might be to use Google’s KeywordToolExternal to see if it suggests a similar volume of searches for the same phrase, remembering to specify the same time frame for each search.
If both WordTracker and the KeywordToolExternal suggests a low search volume, then you might want to be skeptical about using that particular phrase for optimization. Your best results will come when two of the three keyword tools display a reasonably high search volume for a particular phrase. Chances are in such a case that this would be a good phrase to consider for optimization.
Don’t forget the second part of the equation. In addition to finding a set of keywords with a good search volume, you also want to make sure that they have a low or reasonable number of competing webpages. There is no point in competing for a phrase that has 1 million pages competing for it.
Of course, if you are an SEO expert, you might be able to achieve a decent rank for those keywords anyway, but it would require a lot of time and effort that could be better spent on other things. After all, the lower the competition, the better the chance of achieving a high rank.
There is no reason to believe that any keyword tool is 100% accurate, no matter what the tool’s reseller might suggest. Any results should be taken as a general guide to give you an idea of the search volume of a particular keyword.
The good news is, a little care in selecting good keywords is better than none at all. As a beginner in the use of keyword research, I chose some keywords in a rather haphazard way using free keyword tools. Judging from my article view stats at EzineArticles.com, two of the three most highly-viewed articles I had written were all ones I had taken a little care in choosing by using one of the available keyword tools.
In any event, since each keyword tool uses its own proprietary algorithms, the results may not always support each other, but if you use the tools as a general guide, you should be able to make good choices as to which keywords to optimize for.
The bottom line is that you must use your own intuition and common sense to to find a keyword that you would use to conduct a search. After all, that is the whole point of search engine optimization!
WordTracker
https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com
Google’s own KeywordToolExternal
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
SEO Books’ online keyword tool
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword
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