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Useful tools for discovering keywords:
The below tools are mentioned in the methods section of this web site but are placed here in an easy to find format:
- Keyword discovery
- Keyword discovery is one of the better keyword research tools on the market and also is the most expensive at $599/year.
- Word Tracker
- It has been said that word tracker has a cleaner database and is less expensive than keyword discovery but it's database isn't quite as deep as it's competitor.
- According to the Search Engine Journal, "Wordtracker uses data from meta search engines. Unfortunately most people today do not know of, or use meta search engines. Despite the 4 million daily searches, wordtracker data comes from less than 1% of all online searches. We still find the data reported to be very good in the industry and still utilize Wordtracker as a top source."
- Google adsense keyword tool
- A great fee tool from Google that allows you to see the search volume and bidding price for keywords on the Google Adsense relm.
- Overature suggest
- Yahoo!'s version of Google Adsense. Still a useful tool although Google has more traffic and thus more information to base keyword decisions on.
- Dictionary.com's theasaurus
- Dictionary'com has a theasaurus web site that can be extreamely useful in finding synonyms for keywords, a very good idea for brainstorming related ideas to your web site's theme(s).
- Google Trends
- Google has a nice new tool that allows you to compare multiple keywords against each other to see the major trend differences
Tools to help refine or tweak your keywords:
- Google Analytics
- Google Analytics is arguably the leading analytics software on the market today - and it's completely free. There are many uses for this tool but I'm including it here because it can help you find keywords for your web site. How? By checking the "keywords" tab in your analytics account you are able to see which phrases people are using to actually find pages on your web site - this is wonderful feedback because it allows you to tweak your title tags, page content, etc., to help make your page more relevant to searchers and ultimatley bring in more traffic.
- Also keep up with Google's official Analytics Blog
- Google Trends
- This useful tool will give you a comparison of the search volume for 2 or more popular keyword phrases. The reason to use Google Trends is just to get a birds eye view of major keywords and how they contrast with each other.
- Turn personal web search off
- Make sure to turn your personal web search off when checking rankings on Google. add &pws=0 to the end of the url when you do a search to remove any bias that Google creates for you (if you have a google account).