Keyword research is a pretty hot topic for beginning or advanced Internet Marketers alike. After all, if you want search engine traffic, you need to rank well for the specific terms of your industry. However, far too many people rely heavily on keyword research tools. And by heavily I mean exclusively. It’s not that it’s bad to consult the different keyword research services. It’s just that they can sometimes be misleading.

And this is where keyword research common sense comes into play. What this basically means is the fact that if you want to start a new website, the best thing to do before consulting the keyword services is make up your own list of keywords. Of course, this implies that you have at least some intermediate notions about your niche, but that’s the best way to succeed online, right?

Ok, let’s think about a niche, for example soccer – I picked this one because I know something about it, and unless you want to build a thin MFA website, you should know something about your topic also. It is a big niche, and I would advise to start a site on a more specific one, but this is just for the sake of example. Now we can go to the drawing board, and we will do that before consulting the keyword services in any way!

Now think about the work “soccer”, and start writing every keyword that you think YOU would type in the search engines related to the topic. Big chances are that many of the other soccer passionates are looking for approximately the same keywords. I will tell you why that’s important in a second, but not before I present you with another approach.

Write down the word soccer, and also think about the first three verbs and nouns that come into your mind. Also, write down commercial keywords, like “buy”, “cheap”, “free”. If I think about it for a few seconds, the first three soccer related verbs that come into my mind are: play, watch, learn. As for nouns, they are: match, equipment, teams. So we have: “play soccer”, “watch soccer”, “learn soccer”, “soccer match”, “soccer equipment”, “soccer teams”. Now, all you need to do is extrapolate from that. For instance, you have “soccer equipment”. Where do you go from there? “Soccer shoes”, “Soccer balls”, etc. Of course, if you have any other root words that pop up into your mind while doing so, write them down. Like “soccer field” or anything else. If you think about them in relation to your niche, chances are that other people think about them too.

Keep doing this until you have a pretty consistent keyword list. Don’t forget to include the plurals, where the case requires. Then, you can go to your favorite keyword service. You will notice that many of the keywords you thought about in your list are there. However, some of them will not be there but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are not searched for. This is where the keyword research common sense comes in. If you take it into consideration, you might attract traffic from the most unusual sources.

From my experience, this is an important factor. I’ve optimized sites for keywords that supposedly got thousands of hits each month. For instance, I got a 4500 hits/month keyword (according to a keyword research service) to number one on Google. All I got from it were a few hits in a few months (not in one month, in a few months). Then, working on the same site, I came up with another keyword. I checked it on the same service, but it didn’t have records of the respective keyword. But it only seemed like common sense to me, so I got it to top 10. Imagine my surprise when the respective keyword got an average of 10 hits/day, and it wasn’t even on the top spot on Google, it was just top 10. So even though working with Overture, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery is important, don’t forget about the common sense keywords. You might just be surprised!

If you’ve read some SEO books, been on some forums, or just chatted with some friends, you have all heard of the term “keyword research”. It is the foundation of your new site, from where you will start building it brick by brick, article by article. However, if you’ve noticed in the same books, forums or in the minds of your friends, there’s one big dilemma: which of the 4 services mentioned in the title of this post should you use? Almost no one will definitely tell you “Hey, you should go with this one, or with that one”. Nope. As anything else in Internet Marketing, it is not really that simple.

Ok, then. We’ll take them one at a time. We will start with the all time favorite, Overture. Even though, realistically thinking, it is not the best of them. I still am amazed of how many people use Overture figures as a reference. It’s not that it’s good for nothing, but it has the most problems.

• it can’t differentiate plural from singular. So if you are trying to see how many hits the keyword “iphones” gets, you will be amazed to find out that you can’t. Instead, the hits from this keyword are added to the hits of its singular brother;

• the numbers you get back from Overture are dramatically skewed. In fact, whenever I see the Overture numbers, I am actually thinking that a real number would be something in the range of 10-25% of what Overture shows. This is because Overture takes into consideration the hits made by bots or computer software that checks for rankings. Now imagine how much of this activity is being conducted!

• The Overture database is not updated very often. At the time of this writing, it is October 21^st 2007. The figures you get from the Overture database date back from January 1^st 2007. So, if you wanted to apply some Boom Marketing techniques, you can say goodbye to the Overture database. For instance, if you could have foreseen the Halo 3 rush and you wanted to build a website that would be top 10 for related queries by the time of its launch (September 25^th), Overture would not have been the best choice for your keyword research. In fact, it would have been the worst;

• Overture will most likely show results biased by Yahoo’s PPC interests.

Having said that, there are also 2 good points I see in Overture, and they are:

• They show pretty good relative relationships between keywords (because the actual figures are, as I said, dramatically altered);

• They base their results on a major search engine, which is Yahoo.

Let’s go to Wordtracker now. This is a paid tool, but you can use their free version if you want to save some money. It’s just that you will have to do more work yourself – but that always happens when you want to cut down the budget, right? When compared to Overture, Wordtracker is simply better. It gathers its data from 2 search engines, Dogpile and Metacrawler. Combined, they have a 0.65 – 0.70% share of the search engine market. That doesn’t sound like much, but that does not necessarily mean that Wordtracker’s results are in any way worse than the other services. The benefits of using Wordtracker include:

• you get a clear differentiation between the singular and plural versions of a keyword;
• the results are not in any way geared towards the PPC market;
• you get more realistic figures than Overture’s.

The only major disadvantage of using Wordtracker is the fact that it only gathers data from the above mentioned search engines. However, it also tries to repair this by approximating the number of searches taking into account the market share of the respective 2 engines. Of course, that would imply that the behavioral patterns of people looking for information on the search engines are the same, which is of course a utopia. Still, there is no perfect keyword research tool. Not by a longshot.

So we got to Keyword Discovery. This is also a paid service, and it gathers its data from 180 different search engines. From my perspective, what Keyword Discovery does differently – and maybe in a better fashion overall – is mine out the long tailed keywords. As opposed to Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery does not estimate the total number of searches a keyword would get, it shows it as the keyword was recorded in their database.

As for Google’s keyword research tool, I think it is more similar to Overture, if you simply think about the fact that it has a strong PPC influence. This is best used if you plan a Google Adwords campaign, and this is also the reason behind its existence. Another useful feature is for people who look for Adsense revenue. They can easily see which keywords are more expensive and what should they optimize their page for – in order to target more expensive keywords and a bigger CPC implicitly. However, you must remember one thing: no keyword tool is perfect, far from it. If I had to choose between the four on a new website and I could only pick one, that would be Wordtracker for me. However, keyword list building is very time consuming. You also need to think about keyword research common sense, which will be covered in my next post.