Keyword Research Tools
Selecting Keyphrases
Keyword research is a very important process when building a website, as choosing and targeting the wrong keywords can mean potentially losing out on a lot of traffic. Using some of the tools listed below, you can see what are the most searched for keywords and keyphrases and also see alternatives for them. It is also worth considering the long tail of search.
There are a number of tools available which give data on most searched for keyphrases. Entering a phrase into one of these tools returns alternative similar phrases, as well as the number of times they are searched for on the internet.
If you are trying to prioritise phrases, use these tools to see which phrases are searched for most often. You may often find similar but more popular phrases that you may want to target instead. Using these tools allows for fine-tuning of the SEO process.
Keyword Density
Keyword density is the measure of keywords as part of the entire text of a page. Keyword density can be measured using the keyword density analyser of Ranks.nl (http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html).
The tool gives quite a comprehensive list of details about the submitted page, including header data, word count, keywords in page elements, and density and prominence of words.
Keyword Suggestion Tool
The Digital Point keyword suggestion tool (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/) combines Wordtracker and Overture data, and gives relative numbers of how many times they are searched each day.
Wordtracker
Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com/ - is a more comprehensive tool than that offered by Digital Point. It searches its database for actual terms used that include or are similar to your term. It also predicts the number of daily internet wide searches for each term.
Overture
The Overture tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) simply gives the number of searches performed on a particular word/phrase for the previous month, as well as terms that include that phrase. This data is taken from the Overture network, and is not representative of the entire internet, although it does give some idea of what terms are being searched for.
Keyword & Backlink Tracker
The keyword and backlink tracker from Digital Point (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/) works using the Google API and allows you to historically track the number of backlinks, page rank, and number of pages in URL for any site. It also allows you to historically track the rank of keyphrases for any page, so it is easy to spot when Google’s algorithms change, as there will be a lot of movement in the results.
