However, as a recent blog post I read pointed out, all that glitters isn’t gold. It’s all too easy to go barking up the wrong tree but if you follow a few simple guidelines you can use this free tool to great effect.

This short video shows how using the free keyword tool along with Google itself and the seed keywords engine can help you generate better search traffic.

Google Keyword Tool Explained

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In Google’s own words…..

“This column shows the approximate average monthly number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network over a recent 12-month period. This number is specific to your targeted country and language as well as your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu.”

Compare this to the data used by WT, in their own words….

“Wordtracker periodically compiles a database of over 330 million search terms which is updated on a weekly basis. All search terms are collected from the major metacrawlers – Dogpile and Metacrawler.”

And KWD….

“Keyword Discovery collects search term data from over 200 search engines world wide. As a result we have the largest keyword database that contains over 36 billion searches.”

It’s possible that I’m missing something fundamental here but if I’m not then perhaps WT and KWD just became irrelevant. Paid keyword tools have had it their own way for a long time. The careful use of language, the information about where there data is coming from, all, in my opinion, geared towards suggesting the data reflects the habits of Google users the world over .

To my mind people using these tools have been sold the idea that, although the data isn’t coming straight from Google, it can be assumed that the data reflects Google searches. That’s a possibility but now we don’t have to take the risk, now we can see Google’s own keyword stats.

I’m not about to cancel my subscriptions and I hope WT & KWD can turn this to their advantage but I’m struggling to see how and as I publish this I’m not seeing any press release from the companies themselves.

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However, there’s another a great and free resource full of keywords at your disposal that you may not have tapped into, your own analytics data. I have spoken about this before but I thinks it’s worth another mention and this time I’ll make it into a check list because people apparently like check lists.

First off some background. To the inexperienced DIY SEOer Analytics can seem daunting. There’s a lot of graphical and tabular data to wade through and it’s not always clear what the data means. However if you click through to the keywords section, and if you are using PPC make sure you select only the un paid keywords, you can see the key phrases that have sent traffic to your site.

At the top of the list of keywords you may see keywords and key phrases that have sent many visitors to your site. If you carry out your own search using these keywords you may well find your site in page 1. Although there may be an opportunity to fine tune your pages that target these phrases the chances are they are already working hard enough for your site.

Further down the list you will find keywords and phrases that have sent only a few visitors to your site, these are the words and phrases we are interested in here and this is how to use them.

1. Find phrases that have sent some traffic – anything from 1 to 5 visitors to your site.
2. Carry out a search and see where your site is placed for these phrases.
3. Create a list of words and phrases that have sent low levels of traffic where your site is on page 2, 3 or 4 of the search results. This is important, you don’t want phrases that have low traffic levels where you appear on page one for a search using these words. This indicates a phrase that isn’t used very often.
4. Now create pages optimised for these phrases.

The rationale is simple. If a phrase has sent some traffic, even though your page is not in the top ten, then it’s worth seeing what happens if your site has a page that ranks higher for the phrase. In an ideal world a phrase that’s sending some traffic, even though your site has a low rank for that phrase, will send more traffic if your site has a page that ranks higher.

There are no guarantees but what have you got to lose? Analytics will show you if your efforts are sending more traffic and if you create 10 pages each optimised for one of these phrases the chances are some of them will bear fruit.

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There are many ways of finding keywords and some great tools to make the task easier. This list, although in no way exhaustive, offers five ways to start looking for great keywords today.

1. FREE Keyword Tools
   There are many free keyword tools that will give you search volumes for keywords and suggest alternatives. The free versions of these tools won’t provide information on competition and keyword effectiveness but you can pretty much figure this stuff out yourself. One simple tip is to take the keyword suggestions and search for pages with these keywords in their title element, often called the title tag – a fairly good indicator of a page being optimised for the term. Here’s an example of just such a search.
2. Guessing and Brainstorming

   Why not? It’s free and it might work. Although it may seem like a bad idea guessing and brainstorming what people are searching for isn’t that far fetched. If you have analytics tools embedded in your site, and if you haven’t you really should, you can see if your guessed and brainstormed keywords are generating traffic. It’s not the most scientific way of finding great keywords but on a tight budget it’s hard to beat.

   You can further check your guessed and brainstormed list using the many free keyword research tools mentioned above. However, don’t be too quick to dismiss phrases with no search volume. If you think the phrase is viable try it, but make sure you can test for its use by using analytics.

3. Drilling into your Analytics Data
   Leading on from number two, your analytics data is a great source of keyword research. Where the keyword research tools give you data on general search volumes, analytics gives you data on searches that have resulted in a visit to your site. Grab the top 10 keyword searches that have sent traffic to your site. For each keyword establish your search engine position. If you are in position one for a search term you are in good shape. If however, you’re in position six on page three for a term imagine how much traffic it might generate if you can improve on that.
4. Traditional Media

   TV adverts, radio adverts, adverts in magazines, junk mail etc all use trigger words to entice people and grab their attention. In a similar way to guessing and brainstorming you can optimise for keywords you find in traditional media sources.

   Again you can test these phrases for search volume using the free research tools but as with your brainstormed keywords don’t be too quick to dismiss words that show low search volume, especially if you are chasing a particular geographic area.

5. Ask your Friends

   Asking your friends and colleagues may seem like a strange idea but it isn’t. Although the data in the keyword research tools is valuable and very useful the one thing you don’t know is what the person who used the keyword was thinking. You can take an educated guess but you won’t actually know.

   Say you run a hotel and you want to target the weekend break market. You could ask your contacts what they would search for if they were looking to get away for a few days. If you frame a question to your friends such as this you may well discover some great keywords. The SeedKeywords tool is a free resource to help you with this approach to keyword research.

Hopefully this list of free keyword research techniques will help you improve your website’s visibility in the search engines. Keyword research can be very time consuming but the rewards can be huge. There are lots of great keywords with high search volume and very little competition just waiting to be snapped up.

Enter SeedKeywords.com. This new simple, free tool lets you pose a question such as “You are thinking about buying a new car. What would you search for“. The system creates a unique URL for this question for you to send to your network of contacts. You can use email, forums, Twitter, Facebook etc to provide them with the link and ask them to carry out a search – in exactly the same way they would on a search engine. As your contacts carry out a search, a list is built showing the search terms they used.

With SeedKeywords you can quickly build a diverse seed keyword list and although I’m not suggesting you should optimise for these terms it’s a great way to start your keyword research using the well established tools. That said several people have reported discovering keywords that are generating traffic!

It’s early days but already I’m thinking this tool could be useful for optimising for specific socio economic groups and possibly for local search as local habits might be poles apart from what the data in the large keyword tools is suggesting, or not, who really knows.

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Dave,

Thank-you for the information this week – SEO is probably the most frustrating job in the world. You can be doing work on it, but it takes time to see what is effective, AND by the time there is a difference, you are not sure what changes made the difference.

Client

Dear Client,

SEO is only frustrating if you spend your time looking for short cuts – although I’m not suggesting you are. There is no adversarial relationship between you and Google. All Google is trying to do is deliver the most relevant results for a given search.

Stage 1 – It crawls your site and indexes it based on the words it finds on your pages. It takes special notice of the TITLE element as this should describe the whole page in a succinct way.

Stage 2 – It tries to establish the authority of your site by looking at the quantity and quality of the links to it.

So, if your page talks about holiday flats in Edinburgh, Google will index it for these terms. If your in bound links are from relevant sites (sites related in some way to your subject matter), and hopefully sites Google trusts because they also have links to them, your chances of being served up for a search on ‘holiday flats in Edinburgh’ goes up.

So, your page talks about ‘holiday flats in Edinburgh’. Google indexes it and in a short time you are in the index. You search for “holiday flats in Edinburgh” but your page languishes on page 5 of the search results. You become frustrated and think to yourself, why isn’t it on page one!

Well turn this on its head. Why SHOULD it be on page one? Google knows what your page is about but it has no way of knowing if it’s any good. Google’s software doesn’t understand your content. It can’t read it and think to itself – this is good stuff, it’s going onto page one!

Although Google advises there are over 100 hundred factors used to determine how it ranks a page, links are high on the list. It makes sense. Imagine you were thinking of buying a second hand car. Would you use the garage down the road you know nothing about or the one round the corner where five of your pals have bought cars and had a great experience?

Most software is ‘dumb’ and Google’s search engine is no different. It’s great at counting and indexing but rubbish and figuring out quality. You have to help it as much as you possibly can.

Hope this helps a little.

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Thing is nobody is searching for glaggleshindips other than people checking out what I’m saying in this post. The market for glaggleshindips has gone right off, people are just not interested anymore, it’s a real shame.

SEO isn’t the black art people think it is. Sure enough there are SEO practitioners who tend towards the dark side but most are just helping people figure out what people in their markets are searching for and then optimising based on this info.

Before you start fretting about SEO make sure you understand your market. Make sure you are not optimising for glaggleshindips when people simply don’t search for them.

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The problem some people have however is they let their ego get in the way. You need to remember, there’s no place in business for vanity publishing, online or otherwise. This can sometimes mean saying no to having your valuable homepage ranking for a search term you think it should rank for in favour of a term your research is telling you it has to rank for.

You can always optimise a deep linked page for your vanity ranking but you should always reserve your homepage optimisation for words and phrases your potential customers use.

Of course it may be possible to make sure your homepage ranks both for traffic generating words AND your vanity phrase……..

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Very often a little research tells us the sought after phrase has little or no search volume. Quite often a guess has been made based on little or no hard facts. Although I’ve spoken before about keyword research the issue of researching and not guessing keeps coming up.

SEO is tough and ranking for a phrase isn’t easy. With this in mind it’s worth establishing which key phrases are likely to generate traffic and business before putting any effort into optimising for them.

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If you look through the keywords section you will find keywords and phrases that have sent traffic to your site. Some of these will be phrases you have chased but many of them will be keywords and phrases you haven’t.

Find a keyword that’s sent some traffic your way and see where your site is placed in Google for that search. If it’s languishing way down yet it still sent some traffic your way imagine what it might achieve if you optimise a page for it!

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