Step Wise SEO

There are two types of tools, i.e. paid research tools and free research tools. Free research tools are provided by the engines and are as follows.

• Overture Suggestion Tool - probably the most known and most used keyword research tool available to search marketers, this website allows a user to type in a search variable and see hundreds of different variation of the term.

 Each term displayed is an actual term used by a searcher within a given time period and the number of times it was searched for.

• Intuitive search engines - some search engines aren’t known necessarily in the mainstream environment as major players so in many instances these engines develop unique characteristics to find a unique selling proposition.

In some cases, engines such as Eurekster provide search results that aren’t necessarily contextually relevant but are intuitively relevant on trend-based analysis.

For instance: if the same number of users search for `attorney’ as they do for `lawyer’, Eurekster will return both of these as viable search terms.

This goes beyond the Overture Suggestion Tool as that would only return all contextually relevant terms for ‘lawyer’ or ‘attorney’.

• Google Sandbox – Google really hasn’t provided a strong tool for research and the Sandbox is the closest it gets to the quality of the tool provided by Overture.

As Google allows users to buy both singular and pluralized terms this tool is useful for not only keyword research but the multiples of variations on the terms.

 ’Other’ search engine provided keyword tools - most of the major search engines have a suggestion tool.

These terms, as much as they will provide possible variations not found in Overture or Google, are useful for determining where keyword placement might not be worth committing to, as there isn’t the inventory of the major PFP engines. For a complete list of the most useful suggestion tools check the summary of this chapter.

Additional to the suggestion tools in the public domain, there are also software packages and services available that combine a series of these tools to give a bigger-picture look at the search space.

These tools also offer user interfaces to combine the research parameters to aid in increasing efficiency by speeding up the process. The following examples are paid research tools.

• WordTracker - one of the first to market research tools, WordTracker uses information from a variety of sources and provides not only keyword viability, in the form of a KEI Score, but also opportunities for keyword expansion and providing cost information for PFP terms in engines like Overture.

• AdWordsTM Clever Wizard - This system rivals many of the research tools on the market and, as with WordTracker, allows multiple country research.

 A simple interface not only scores keywords, again with a KEI score, but gives an indication of the number of sites listed in the results page in both the PFP and Organic listings.

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