Brainstorming keywords that seem relevant to your website may help to identify keywords to target in a search engine marketing campaign. However, the actual keywords used by web searchers may be surprising more often than not. Fortunately, tools are available that mine available search data and conveniently allow one to peruse both related keywords as well as their respective query volumes.
Such services include:
- Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com)
- Keyword Discovery (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com)
- The Yahoo! Search Marketing Keyword Tool (http:// inventory.overture.com)
Both Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery are free-based tools that tap into various smaller search engines to assemble their data. The latter is a free tool that uses the data from Yahoo! Search Marketing’s pay-per-click network.
Because none of these tools are immune to data anomalies- and even deliberate manipulation- it may be wise to use two tools and some intuition to assess whether the data is real.
