Free Keyword Research Tools

[Garrett]

I was visiting Dan Thies' revamped SEO Research Labs (http://www.seoresearchlabs.com) site and found a couple SEO tools he linked to that may help your efforts.

The first is Peter Faber's Keyword Effectiveness Rank (http://www.seo-works.com/seo-resources/keyword-effectiveness-rank.html) forumula, which allows you to either import and analyze data directly from WordTracker or, if you don't use WordTracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/), to insert it yourself and receive a detailed, easy to analyze report.

Faber explains that, "in order to get an idea of the real value a keyword has for your web site you need to compare it with something. Comparing it with the average popularity and average competition of your chosen keywords will give a result that is understandable."

"The KER shows a result in percentages. A keyword with a KER of 100% is an average keyword. A keyword with a KER of 400% is a very good keyword."

So why should you use his KER system instead of Sumantra Roy's Keyword Effectiveness Index? Faber claims that KEI "assumes that the competition of a site in position 10.000.000 is just as strong as the competition of a site in the TOP10. Also it assumes that a popularity of 100.000 is twice as big as a popularity of 50.000."

Right now you can only compare 25 keywords and he says it's in testing. This service is currently free.

Another tool Dan recommended, which also comes recommended by Danny Sullivan (http://www.searchenginewatch.com), is Good Keywords (http://www.goodkeywords.com/), a free application that will help you "find the perfect set of keywords" for your website.

The software appears to be completely free and they don't even collect your email address.

Sullivan said, "I'm not easily impressed with promotion software, but this one's a keeper."

Some people are apparently using this tool to determine what products they should be selling. I haven't seen much on how it works though, or read much in forums on this one.

When you've had a chance to play with it let me know what you think.

Also, be sure to check out Dan's new ad (060204) posted on the Nigritude Ultramarine (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=nigritude+ultramarine) search. Smart marketing - part of his target market includes professional SEOs.

[Dave Hawley]

A keyword with a KER of 400% is a very good keyword.

Yes, but very good for what? Driving buying traffic or non-buying traffic.

If I entered "Free Excel Training" vs "Excel Training" Wouldn't it tell me "Free Excel Training" is much better than "Excel Training"?

Also, which SE's are these keywords derived from?

[Christian_SEO]

We've been using Good Keywords (http://www.goodkeywords.com/) for about 3 years now on all our optimization projects for both ourselves and our clients.

We tried Word Tracker, and I know that it's the only choice for most pros, but GKW works well for us so we have no reason to change.

GKW pulls scored keyword data from Overture and some other sites, but we just the data from Overture. It's better that what Overture provides because you can do more with the data. We just copy it to the clipboard, paste it into a text file, edit out the junk we don't want, and save the file. We then import it into Excel where we can sort it by keyword, score, or if we assign categories, by keyword type.

While the scores for keywords are different between WT and GKW, they are close enough that I don't worry about it. Besides, we use General Opitmization, and the scores for any specific keyword phrase is not that important.

I used to think KEI was cool, but the number of competitive sites really doesn't matter to us, since we don't care about ranking or positioning, only qualified traffic.

[Curious George]

I couldn't find any documentation on how to use the application. Does anyone know if it exists?

Curious George

[Mel]

...
I used to think KEI was cool, but the number of competitive sites really doesn't matter to us, since we don't care about ranking or positioning, only qualified traffic.

I agree that KEI (and KER also) really miss the mark as far as I am concerned.

Both of these factors are based on a numerical analysis of the number of competing sites, but in reality that tells you nothing IMO since all that matters is how well the top ten sites are optimized for a particular keyword, and these numbers reveal nothing about that.