Keywords are the foundation of any successful SEO strategy. In an instant they can show you a variety of important factors:

1. Your Target Audience

2. What kind of company you are

3. Transactional Process (B2B, B2C, C2C, etc)

4. Products/Services you offer

5. Level of skill at online marketing and SEO

I put that last one in because it really is true. Part of my initial research for any client involves looking at their competitors to judge how competitive the particular market is. Looking at the keywords that they use is a telling sign of the amount of time, effort, and skill the webmaster has.

Today I'm going to show you 4 known tools, some of which aren't so well known, to help you put together you keywords and phrases.

Word Tracker- www.wordtracker.com

This isn't one of the tools that I'm going to show you today, but if you don't use this to help you get you keywords, suggestions, and competitive data you need to NOW. I use this on a regular basis to quickly judge the competitiveness of certain keywords and to find niche markets that are ripe for the picking.

On to the tools...

This is one of my favorite quick-use tools. It takes no time to learn what it's doing and its FREE.

Seo Digger - www.seodigger.com

The thing that I like about this tool is that you enter a url for any website and it returns the top 20 (if there are that many) searches that the website would place in the top 20 organic search results.

What this can tell you quickly is what keyword markets the website is targeting and optimizing for. I use this for competition anlaysis mostly. However, in that same use it is excellent for giving me keyword ideas and suggestions.

If you look at the results pages you'll notice two columns of numbers, "WT" and "OT". These are keyword popularity indecies from Word Tracker and Overture. This is kind of nice because it helps save you a bit of time from having to manually cross reference. However, the Overture data I find isn't that useful as it once was.

....On to the second tool...

What I like about this second one, Google Trends, is that it shows relevant industry data, but the way in which it presents it is pretty interesting.

Google Trends - www.Google.com/trends

The basic idea of this is showing ratio of searches for a given population over time. This can be a bit confusing. Basically you enter a search term or phrase and it first returns the countries that have the highest search volume per capita for that particular phrase. It then shows graphs and charts about the volumes over the past.

A nice feature about this is that it pulls relevant news item articles and shows you, by date, where they happened on the historical volume graphs. So, you can see how the news and what events effect the markets in which you're operating online.

Ok, ok, so what else? Well, as you go deeper and deeper into the results you see that it continually filters it down geographically, still showing the highest search volume per capita. So, your term first returns that a high volume of searches come from the US. You click on the United States, then it shows some states with the highest, then you click on states and it goes to the city level. Good Stuff for local search optimization!

What makes this important? Town A may not have a lot of searches for a given term, however if the ratio of searches to population is very high, in other words, of all the searches, the majority is of a particular phrase. That can be very important in where and who you target for online advertising.

I use this a lot when initially deciding which local regions to target for AdWords if that particular ad campaign calls for that type of marketing.

... This third tool is pretty new and to be honest, probably needs a bit more time before being put into the game, but I still use it and it's something to keep an eye on....

Commercial Intent Analyzer - http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx

This is a neat little tool that came out of the Microsoft Ad Labs. It basically tries to measure: If user searches for term A, how likely are they going to actually purhase something online or are they merely looking for information?

It displays data in a decimal percentage so times the result number by 100 to get your percentage.

Another neat thing that it shows you is where you can enter a url and it shows the % of visitors that come with commercial intent and the % of those looking for information. So, putting in a shopping website should hopefully show that the majority of traffic coming in shows a high commercial intent.

This can be used to judge how successful and website is or could be.

This last one is another keyword tool. It provides monthly data that it gathers from various online sources into one easy to use application.

Keyword Discovery - www.keyworddiscovery.com

It's free to a certain extent after you create a user account. For free it will return the top 10 searches for a given keyword or phrase that you enter. That should be good enough to get you started on a keyword strategy as you probably don't care about the results in the 11+ results range anyways.

You enter a keyword and it spits out the top 10 searches that are most similar to what you entered. What I like about this is that not only are you getting data that shows you how competitive the market it, but it also gives you ideas and suggestions for other relevant search terms and phrases.

A feature that I don't widely use, but could be nice for international marketing people is that you can initially select various keyword databases by country. For general US data I select the first option for "Global Premium", but you can see all the others that are available to you.

Well, that's it. Those are 4 excellent tools to use in tandem with Word Tracker. The information that shared today is a very "top level" overview of these. Take some time to get familiar with each one first. As you become more familiar with these tools you'll learn better how to use them together to produce some interesting results. The way that search is going these days you need to be innovative, hopefully these tools will aid you in that need.

Have a question about SEO or internet marketing in general? Send me a request and I'll try to answer you question as best as possible.