Keyword Research Part 3: How Do I Do Keyword Research?

Manually collecting all the information needed for keyword research would be time consuming and in some cases, such as keyword popularity, impossible. Fortunately, there are people willing to help in a variety of ways. Some tools are free and some are not.

Keyword Popularity:
There are three commonly used keyword popularity tools:

o Google AdWords Keyword Tool (free)
or WordTracker (fee)
o Keyword discovery (fee)

These are all online tools. Google is free and gets its information from Google’s own search data, but they specifically state that all results are “approximate” and many keywords have a “Not Enough Data” result. WordTracker and Keyword Discovery are online tools that access a search database of smaller search engines. Each has a monthly fee, but keyword popularity information is almost impossible to get for free, except for Google’s tool. Although the information is not entirely accurate, it can give you a good idea of ​​which keywords are worth targeting with your search engine optimization.

Page Strength:
There are several tools available to help determine the competitive strength of a page. Here are some options:

o SEOmoz Page Force Tool (fee)
o LifeTips Page Strength Tool (free)

LifeTips Page Strength Tool is currently free, but, as is often the case, you get what you pay for. The SEOmoz tool is much better.

Keyword difficulty:

o SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool (fee)
o SEOChat Keyword Difficulty Tool (Free)
o Google AdWords Keyword Search Tool (free)
o WordTracker KEI Tool (fee)
o Keyword Discovery KEI Tool (fee)
o WordTracker and Keyword Discovery offer KEI information with their popularity research tool.

Professional SEO experts:
If you’ve read all three keyword research articles, you may be thinking, “This is a little over the top for me.” or “I don’t have time for all this.” Fortunately there are people who do this for a living. Hiring an SEO professional will save you a lot of time that would be spent learning how to do keyword research and then doing it. And assuming you hire a good one, you should be able to do better than yourself. A potential downside to hiring a professional SEO could be the cost, but when you consider the cost of buying all the tools you only need to research one site, hiring someone who already has the tools may end up being less expensive.

If you decide to hire someone to do keyword research or the entire SEO process, make sure you find someone who has been doing it for a while. This industry has its share of “flying” companies. There are “professional” search engine optimizers who are really just a guy who just bought a book and created a website and then there are companies with years of experience and practice in getting results. It may cost a bit more, but if you go with the experienced people, it will be worth it in the end.