Step Wice SEO

The keyword list you got doesn’t mean much to you until you find out which of these keywords are actually being used by searchers.

You’re also going to want a sense of how competitive the SEO field is for a keyword so you can get a handle on just how hard you might have to fight to rank well for it.

Fortunately, there are keyword analysis tools available to help you suss out this important information.

And, also fortunately, there are not so many different high quality options to choose from, so the decision is far from overwhelming.

We’ll discuss the top two here:
• Wordtracker
• Yahoo! Search Marketing Keyword Selector Tool

Wordtracker
Wordtracker is the dominant tool for keyword research in the SEO industry. In a nutshell, it tells you how many people are searching for the terms you may want to use on your site.

It does this by monitoring and recording searches on meta search engines throughout the Web.

You can use it to get an estimate of how many searches will be performed for a given term, and it is also an excellent source of related terms and common misspellings.

Wordtracker doesn’t give an up-to-the-minute snapshot-its data reflects searches that took place a few months before you retrieve it.

Wordtracker is available at www.wordtracker.com for a fee. We know how you hate to spend money, so now is the only time we’ll tell you something like this: The Wordtracker fee is indispensable in your SEO efforts.

We suggest that you use Wordtracker today and tomorrow as the primary tool for whittling down your long keyword list into something meaningful.

If you need to be economical, Wordtracker makes it easy for you: you can purchase low-cost subscriptions in one-day or one-week increments.

Wordtracker isn’t hard to use, so we’ll leave the step-by-step instructions, if you need them, to the folks who made the tool.

You can download their user guide once you have logged into the system. There is also a FAQ and other resources on their website.

Be sure to read up on the different databases (Comprehensive, Compressed, etc.) available within the system so you can choose the best one for your needs.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Keyword Selector Tool
Buried in the interface of Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), one of the primary providers of pay-per-click (PPC) services, is its Keyword Selector Tool. This free tool taps into data on searches performed throughout the YSM search network.

It’s sometimes hard to find the URL for this tool. Start from the YSM Resource Center homepage, http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch, and look for a link labeled Keyword Selector Tool.

If you don’t find it there, or if the URL has changed, you can always find the current link on our companion website at www.yourseoplan.com.

There are two nice things about the YSM tool: it’s free, and it’s simple. All you do to use it is enter a keyword phrase.

Up will pop a list of related terms along with your original term and the number of searches that took place throughout the YSM network over the course of a month (the data is usually a couple of months old).

However, YSM has many fewer features than Wordtracker, and because it uses PPC data, it combines terms that may not be combined by nonpaid engines.

For example, YSM sees the words clothes and clothing as being the same-this is called stemming-while any organic search engine would not.

It also does some funky things with alphabetization. So for example, if you search for the term “send in the clowns,” YSM will return information about the term “clown in send sinatra the,” with all the words in alphabetical order.

Now, you’re a smart one, and it won’t take long before you can see that a term like “clown in send sinatra the” is so ludicrously unlike the English language that nobody is really searching for it in that order.

Stemming and alphabetization limit the usefulness of the YSM tool, but it’s still a great way to spot popularity trends.

By the way, here’s a tip that can save you a bunch of time: YSM data is available within the Wordtracker tool too.

Last we looked, Wordtracker was still calling YSM’s data the Overture database (Overture was bought by Yahoo!), so be on the lookout for changes in labels here.

Switch to the Yahoo! Search Marketing (aka Overture) database within Wordtracker, or go to the Yahoo! Search Marketing site, and test-drive it with some of your favorite keywords.

No keyword research tool is perfect, and you should always double-check the data you get with your gut instincts.

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