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Google just recently released a new cool search based keyword tool for keyword research. You can use it for free at:
http://www.google.com/sktool

The Search-based Keyword Tool generates keyword relevant and specific to your website. The result from the sktool is based on real searches on Google.

As usual with Google the tool is labeled as beta. Google always seem to put beta after everything they release even if its been tested by millions of users. Anyway, this tool is actually really useful today.

The sktool is created for Google Adwords users but anyone can use it for free. If you are logged into your Adwords account while you use the tool all keywords you already have in your campaigns will be filtered out. You can also specify your own filters to get more specific results. For example you can filter on a range for the bidding price. You can filter the results for a specific page by filling in the URL contains field with the name of your page (ie the part of your domain after the url).

Also note that by default the results are filtered on your billing region. In other words I got my results tailored for Sweden which is not what I wanted since my targeted market is really not Sweden. In the manage settings box in the left hand column simply change the setting to what you want.

When you do a search the tool tries to get keywords from your web site and the keywords you provide as a starting point for its suggestions. The results you get from the keyword search are always matched to the site you provide. Each search returns a list of suggested keywords with an estimate on monthly searched, how much competition there is and a suggested bidding price for the keyword.

Google alerts let you subscribe to a search phrase. If you signup to the free service you get a new mail each day on new discoveries by the google bots for your phrases.

Subscribe to keywords related to your product or site and you will discover new forums and blogs. Some I guarantee you did not know existed.

Subscribe to you’re your name as a keyphrase and you will now right away when something is written about you on the internet.

If you have a product, subscribe to all news related to your product. I have several software products and I get alerts as soon as the software is discussed somewhere. If someone is asking a question I can jump in and answer it. If someone is complaining about the program I can go in and explain.

I have also found completely new uses for my software. People have used the software to solve issues with it I did not even know existed. Things I would not know today if I did not have my alerts setup.

Say you write a blog about “personal development”, just enter “personal development” in google alert. Each day you will get a new mail listing new discussions, blogs and news related to “personal development”. This reminds me, I have a few more terms I should subscribe to.

Another thing you should subscribe to is my free web traffic mailing list at www.YourTrafficTips.com. You will get a new web traffic tip in your inbox each day. Each tip is written as short as possible with a step by step list, it will take you no more than 1 minute to read if you don’t take action, which you should though.

Keyword research is important to make sure there is an audience for what you write about. It is also a tool to find new audiences you did not even know existed. If you are selling products it might even reveal large niche markets you have missed.

Use your competition

Find other pages about the same subject you cover. Check their pages, use their meta tags, see what seems like keywords in titles and headers.

Use your imagination

The obvious start is to think about what people would search for if they knew your page existed and they wanted to find just exactly your information.

List all product info

If you are writing about product make sure you include even the very specific information. For example the exact camera model number if you write about a Sony camera. The isbn number if you write about a book. Don’t stuff your page with this but include it somewhere on the page. Some people are searching for exactly what you are writing about; give them a chance to find it.

Use Google suggests

Use Google Adwords

Google Adwords have a build in keyword suggestion tool. Create a campaign and use the tools for keyword research, you even get an estimated traffic volume. If you do not want to there is no need to actually run the campaign.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

Google insight is a free service from Google that allows you to compare search patterns in categories, in specific regions and over time. It also gives a list of search terms related to your keywords.

Enter one or more search term in the search box.

Next, Filter the results from the filter drop down lists. Perhaps you are only interested in results from the last year.
If you are only doing business in one country you can filter on that country and you can filter on a specific category. This might be important if your term could be used in several different contexts.

When you are done click search

First you will see a graph of search trend over time. The scale is normalized so you don’t see the exact number of searches but will see trends clearly. If the keyword is gaining more interest over time or less. If the trend is going down perhaps this is not a good keyword to spend energy on. But on the other hand if the search term is getting few searches today but have a positive trend it might still be worth going after. Use Wordtracker together with Google insight and you have a pretty good idea of the number of the future of the term.

Below the trend graph you see a world map with all different shades of blue depending on how popular the term is in a region off the world. Remember that for search term with low search volume the results may be skewed for the smaller regions regions.

Last, and perhaps most interesting is the list of related search terms. Use these as suggestions of new keywords you might want to target. You also get a list of related keywords that have a positive trend even if they keyword you searched for had a negative trend.

Compete.com is a service that let you compare site traffic for different web sites side by side. You enter the top urls of the sites you want to compare. The service present you with a graph of the number of visitors for each site every month one year back in time.

If you signup for their pay service you get results up to three years back in time. The service is a bit expensive at $499 a month. Included with the subscription you also get a complete list of keywords driving traffic from search engines and a breakdown on what sites are referring traffic. You can also find out where visitors are heading after a visit to a site.

I use the free service to monitor my sites.

You have to remember that just as with Alexa the traffic data compete uses is not complete. I have seen months on my sites that have been better than average from my analytics, monitoring all traffic. On compete these month looked like bad months. The more traffic the site has the more correct are the numbers from compete. The same goes for keywords, I have some keywords that did not show up in compete that really where my top ones.

My main use for compete is to check the top competition to get ideas for keywords that I can use on my pages and in articles I write. I find it really valuable as a help with keyword research. Even if the numbers are not 100% accurate I know that at least one person used the phrase and probably more. Then I use the keywords to generate more keywords with other tools. It is also interesting to see if a competition has targeted a completely different niche for their product than I have. In that case it might be worth investigating.

Now you can investigate my free traffic tips newsletter and get more visitors to your sites. No point in monitoring a site if you don’t have any visitors, right?

Alexa measures web popularity by users that have their toolbar installed and some other sources. Since not all traffic is measured you get a statistical value and it will vary a bit depending on what type of visitors you site has. The more visitors a site has the more accurate the numbers are.

Alexa ranks sites by their position in the world. The most popular site in the world is number 1, the second most popular number 2 and so on. The results are also over a period of time, when your site is new it will take a few weeks for the score to reflect reality and stabilize.

I wrote this in a previous post but here are the step by step instructions to use Alexa:
• Go to www.alexa.com and click on the “Traffic ranking” button
• Enter the url your want to investigate. You will see how the site ranks in the world over time.
• Click on the “sites linking in” link in the left bar to get a list of the referring sites.
• Click on the “related links” to get the top other sites people visiting this site is also visiting.

If a site is ranked among the top 1 million sites in the world it is actually quite good. At 100 000 it is a great success.

You can use Alexa to learn which competition is successful and which you don’t need to worry about yet.

Use the related links to find competition or possible partners you might now have known about.

Alexa also lists the most popular sites in the world, you can view the 500 most popular for free. If you want more result you can buy it from the site, this information can be invaluable to see trends in the world.

Would it not be great if you could spy on your competition and see what they do?

If you know what keywords people are using to find your competition you can target the same keywords. If you know the top sites linking to your competitions pages you can try to get links from them as well. Anyway, if you don’t do this your competitors might. You might want be interesting on what can be found out about your sites.

The first tool – Alexa

Alexa let you measure how a domain ranks in the world.
• Go to www.alexa.com and click on the “Traffic ranking” button
• Enter the url your want to investigate. You will see how the site ranks in the world over time.
• Click on the “sites linking in” link in the left bar to get a list of the referring sites.
• Click on the “related links” to get the top other sites people visiting this site is also visiting.

The second tool – Compete

Compete.com let you compare sites over time. The results from compete is also gathered from a toolbar and cooperating sites and ranks how popular a site is. You get the basic information for free. If you want more information they have a pay service you need to signup to.
• Go to www.Compete.com
• Enter the url and click the “Get Site Analytics”
• See the top keywords driving traffic

The third tool – SpyFu

SpyFu is another variation on the basic same idea. You get organic searches but also information on keywords used in advertisement campaigns.
• Go to www.spyfu.com
• Enter the url and click
• See the top advertised keywords and organic keywords

We are ready to begin

The next step is to make a visit to WordTracker. They have a free keyword research tool at:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

The free version has a limit to the number of results you will get. If you want more results you have to sign up for a subscription to their pay service. Their free service will work fine for us now.

Enter your keywords one at a time and write down the number of hits returned by the tool in the cell right next to the keyword.

WordTracker returns the number of searches per day on their search network. Most likely even more people will search for the term on Google. Another thing to notice is that we are talking about searches, not actual clicks for the term.

When you enter your search term in WordTracker you will also get a list of variations on your search term. Add these as well to your spreadsheet if they are relevant.

When you have all your keywords recorded with the number of hits per day we can go to the next step.

Point your browser to Google and enter each search term. In the third column record the number of results. Write down the results from the top 5 results, one url per cell.

In the next cell calculate the number of searches / results.

For example a keyword with 400 searches and 40 000 results and will get a ratio of 0,01.
A keyword with 100 searches and 40 000 results will get a ratio of 0,0024.

This ratio will give you the benefit versus reward for the search term. I use this ratio as a guideline to select which term to target first. A higher ratio gives a better return on my time.

To make sure you are targeting the right terms you should also set a max limit on the number of results, ie a term with several million search results is going to be very hard to succeed with.

The thing you do then is to add more terms to you key phrase, the number of results will decrease as well as the number of searches. You calculate a new ratio for this new longer phrase as well.

I also take a look at the top results returned by Google. If the top sites are .gov domains there is probably no chance of getting a top placement for the term. You might also want to check the page rank of the top results. If the top result has a higher pr than 6 it is going to be very hard to take the top spot.

That was a basic introduction to keyword research. There is really much more to tell but this should be enough to get your started.

There are a number of tools available to help you with keyword research. They can save you time. I still recommend you to do it manually a few time to get a feel for the process before investing in any tool. All tools have a learning curve. Focus your attention on learning the important thing instead of new tools.

Now you should signup to my “Improve by Doing” newsletter to learn more about web traffic generation. Remember, the key to any traffic generation tactic is actually doing it.

Keyword research acts like a catalyst for web traffic generation.

“Catalysis is the process in which the rate of a chemical reaction is increased by means of a chemical substance known as a catalyst. Unlike other reagents that participate in the chemical reaction, a catalyst is not consumed.”

Keyword research does not generate traffic in itself but keyword research can multiply the speed you generate traffic with virtually all other web traffic tactics.

You use the words and phrases you find when you generate content for other traffic tactics. By researching the words people use for searching you know where it is most effecticve to spend your time.

You will know if there is so much competition for a phrase that it is not even worth going after. You will know if there is so little interest in a phrase that even if you manage to get the number one sport in the search engines, it would still not get you any visitors.

So how do you go about doing keyword research?

First of all I assume you have a site and a subject you are focusing on.

Write down the phrases you think people would use to find your content. Write these down in a new spreadsheet file, one phrase per row. Your phrases needs to be at the very least two words long.

I will post later about how you can come up with more phrases but that is a subject in itself that will take a full post.

Tomorrow I will continue with details on how to do the keyword research and how to know which phrase to focus your time on. By focusing your time on where it makes the most different you will improve you traffic even more when doing any tactic.

Today you should focus on coming up with keywords for your research. Take a few seconds to signup to my new “Improve by Doing” newsletter to learn more about web traffic generation. Remember, the key to any traffic generation tactic is actually doing it.