Free Keyword Tool

Keyword research is one of those things that we should ALL do more of.  As internet marketers, we want to make money online so that we don’t have to work for somebody else, we keep more of what we make, we don’t have to drive to an office every day, and we make our OWN rules.

Search Engines

Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and all the other search engines currently don’t have the ability to look at images and tell what they are; they may never be able to do this (though I think it will happen one day).  No, they must rely on words.  Words, either individually, or strung-together are called ‘keywords’ and it’s these that the search engines are looking for.

Long Tail

For a good while, I really didn’t understand the difference between one-word keywords and what is now termed ‘long-tail keywords’, but now I do (at least I think I do!!).

Long tail simply means you have a string of words, probably up to about seven, and people typically type these into a search-box on their favorite search engine because they want to be as specific as possible.

Products

Now, if you’re looking for a specific product, like my new cell phone which I just purchased (nice little LG enV3), then I could have found direct references to it by simply typing it’s model number OR ‘LG enV3′.  What turns up in the SERPS (search engine results pages)?  Lots of results of companies either selling the phone, or forums on how to USE the phone (let’s face it, being able to make calls on new cell phones now is about 1% of what they can do!).

General Searches

If, however, I searched like this: ‘how to web surf with a cell phone’ then something very different shows up. Firstly, references to the words how, to, with and ‘a’ are all ignored, so the the only words that the search engines are interested in are surf, cell, phone and web.

The results are very different of course, bringing up millions of pages with ANY reference to any and all of these words.

Be Specific

To make your searches more targeted, you have to be specific.  The easiest way todo this is to simply put your search term (long tail keyword) in speech-marks ” “.  This tells the search engines that you are ONLY interested in EXACTLY what you typed.  This often leads to NO RESULTS, but also you’ll often receive just a few VERY TARGETED results, and doing this will tell your search engine that you DO want to include the words ‘how, to, with and a’.

If the results don’t get you what you wanted, you can simply rephrase your question and use similar words in place of your first ones.  Try to think about how OTHER people say things. For example,  do you often use the word “vicinity’?  If so, try using the word ‘place’.  Do you use the word ‘house’?  Try using the word ‘home’.  You get the idea.

Free Tool

There’s a great new (ish) tool from the people who give you (also free) Trellian WebPage called Keyword Discovery. While there IS (of course) and upgraded version available at cost, this is a great alternative to the free Google Adwords suggestion tool.

Give it a try; I think it will add some good words that Google doesn’t have.

Luke.