Keyword Tools

Do Keyword Tools fulfil their worth?

We are sure you are very aware, that keywords are a crucial, if not vital part of Search Engine Optimisation, and certainly for the beginning of a Search Engine Optimisation project. It is very important to select the right keywords to optimise your website for. Why? You could spend weeks/months, and in the case of this site, it's going to be a yearly challenge to rank high for our keywords, but what if you do all your work for keywords that don't get traffic, and even if after a certain amount of time you are ranking highly for them, so what? You may have wasted valuable time on optimising for unpopular Search Terms! And that is why choosing the right Keywords / Keyprhases for a Search Engine Optimisation Campaign is Vital! It's certainly not easy to find the balance between competitive and uncompetitive terms, that make things a challenge but certainly no where near impossible. Well, Keyword Tools can come into their own when it comes to needing help, or a resource in deciding to pursue which keywords you are going to optimise for. But, do their fulfil their worth? Are Keyword Tools really all that accurate?

So, what's the main keyword tools available at the moment? Well, that's pretty simple! We have, Overture, Word Tracker, Bruce Clay's tool and Trellian Keyword Discovery. Not the biggest line-up ever, you may have expected more, but these are definitely some of the best (apparently). Now then, sadly there's another dilemma to face, not only do you have to find the keywords you are going to optimise for, but which out of these tools will give you the best results, in other words, which one should you use?? Well, there is a happy ending (for once), and trust us on this one, don't take the number to be exact in any of these, and only use them as a rough guide. It's highly unlikely that one of them will show a keyword as having thousands of search's a day, while another only showing tens. We actually don't know how accurate these keyword tools are, as none of them are actually direct from the source (source being a Search Engine). It would be every webmaster's dream to have their own little Keyword Tool direct from source, but at the moment, it looks like that's not happening anytime soon.

Want things put a little simpler? No problem. OK, so lets take a keyword..., lets say "men's sportswear". You may use Overture and look up your keyword, in this example being "men's sportswear", this may show to have a lot of searches. OK, so I have found my keyword with high search figures, I have my keyword. NO!, If you want to take this seriously, its worth spending an extra few minutes to test another tool and see the results they bring. It's better to see that a few tools show high search figures for certain terms, then you can be more comfortable and more confident in optimising and working on your site to aim to rank highly for these keywords, and when you manage to do so, there's going to be some good traffic to your site to praise you for your hard work. Make note that you check the timeframe's for the searches i.e.. monthly and daily.

Now that you have built up a reasonable list of keywords that you are happy with the approximated traffic they receive, check out the competition. To do this you can visit a Search Engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, MSN), and type in some of those keywords you have acquired. The number of results it returns or "competition", is the competition you are facing for this keyword. If there's some keywords that were shown to have high traffic and little competition, then these are really good keywords you have found your site to optimise for. However, if there's really high competition for some of your keywords, it's best to really think about whether these keywords would be worth your time or not, only you can decide.
So, no-one actually knows how accurate keyword tools out their are. We are certain they are not 100% accurate, and if anyone claims their tool is, which would be surprising, unless its a major search engine making that claim, then don't believe it for a second. Make sure you realise that the results for search figures are not entirely active, but should actually give a good value on how popular a certain keyword is. We hope that this article has been helpful and informative.