Top 5 Keyword Research Tools

by Sarah Manners, 8/10/2006

Before optimisation of your site's copy can even begin many, many hours are spent on the process of selecting the best possible key phrases to optimise the site for. Unless you are certain that the keywords / phrases you are optimising your site for are the right ones, there is very little point in employing SEO at all. However if the best possible keywords / phrases are selected the results will astound you.

The ultimate selection of the keywords is more of an art than an exact science. Each search engine marketer has their own preferences when it comes to keyword research tools - the tools discussed in this article are my top five!

Keyword Discovery

My personal favourite - Trellion's Keyword Discovery Tool, captures data from an impressive 180 international search engines. Compared to Wordtracker, which uses meta-search engines, Trellion's data is far more comprehensive, with the database consisting of approximately 32 billion searches from the last 12 months.

Keyword Discovery features include: reporting on the frequency of searchers for specific key phrases, specific industry keywords, KEI analysis, Keyword Density analysis, related key phrase searches, common misspellings and synonyms as well as seasonal search trends.

For keyword research, the more information you have at your disposal - the better. The sheer volume of data produced by Keyword Discovery will no doubt impress you. While some tools return a few hundred results you have thousands being returned by Keyword Discovery. The awesome project logging feature will save you vast amounts of precious time while the seasonal search trend reporting feature will expose you to the keywords which performed best over certain times (such as the summer holiday season).

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Tell me what you do!

As soon as new site visitors arrive at your website the first thing they need to know, before anything else, is what you do. You can talk all you like about how great you are, but unless you spell out what you actually do, they won't even know what you're so great at! This oh-so-overlooked yet such basic of information can be communicated to your site visitors in a number of different ways. Read 'Tell me what you do!'.

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