Awesome Keyword Research Tools

Mostly Free or Totally Free

Here is my gift to you! I am sure you will be ecstatic. I consider myself very lucky. You will, too, for coming to this website.

Tools such as these, made possible by generous souls, are being put on the "Endangered Tools" list. Still available and eminently functional, these tools are a must for you to be seriously involved in making money online. Here they are. If you like to be notified of such finds, consider subscribing to my mailing list (see right hand column).

1. Keyword Suggestion tool (free) - DEAD now

A (now dead) FREE tool that used to display results from Wordtracker & Overture to help you determine keywords/keyphrases searched most often.

Unique feature: Allowed you to enter a keyword (or phrase) as well as the market you wish to search that term in (i.e. USA/Japan), but the market-related search data is unfortunately only relevant for Overture's results, which is gone!

From http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

2. SEO for Mozilla/Firefox (free)

Aaron Wall, of SEO Book fame, recently released an awesome SEO extension for Firefox users.

"This tool was designed to add more data to Google and Yahoo! to make it easier to evaluate the value and competitive nature of a market. SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results. In addition to pulling in useful marketing data this tool also provides links to the data sources so you can dig deeper into the data." - Aaron Wall creator of SEO for Firefox.

When activated, this extension immediately provides you with a host of vital SEO information about the sites visible in your Google and Yahoo! Search results. This information includes PageRank, age, links, .edu links, .gov links, del.icio.us numbers, Technorati rank, and Alexa rank. If you're a Firefox user check out the site and download it today; playing around with this cool tool is fun!

SEO for Firefox also links to some seriously nifty keyword research tools including SEO Book's Keyword Research Tool, Overture View Bid, Google's Traffic Estimator, Google's Keyword Sandbox and Google trends.

Remember that excessive use of this extension may get you banned from data sources (including Google and Yahoo!), it also uses a lot of bandwidth - so remember to turn it off when you don't need it!

SearchStatus (free)

SearchStatus was developed by Quirk's CEO, Craig Raw, for the highly specialized needs of search engine marketers. SearchStatus is a definite must have for all you search geeks out there. It is supported by Matt Cutts, (former?) lead engineer of Google, Danny Sullivan, the acknowledged father of search engine optimisation and Geoff Mack, product manager of Alexa. SearchStatus is essentially a toolbar extension that allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing.

For every site, you visit using Firefox or Mozilla, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN - for the first time all in one place.

Like Firefox itself, SearchStatus is an open-source product, requiring no licensing fees and promoting user additions and modifications. Download this awesome SEO tool today!

Keyword Discovery (not free but has a trial)

My personal favorite - Trellion's Keyword Discovery Tool, captures data from an impressive 180 international search engines. Compared to Wordtracker, which uses meta-search engines, Trellion's data is far more comprehensive, with the database consisting of approximately 32 billion searches from the last 12 months.

Keyword Discovery features include: reporting on the frequency of searchers for specific key phrases, specific industry keywords, KEI analysis, Keyword Density analysis, related key phrase searches, common misspellings and synonyms as well as seasonal search trends

Wordtracker (not free but has a trial)

Wordtracker is one of the most venerable and oft-mentioned when it comes to keyword research. Its statistics come from meta-search engines only by compiling a massive database of keywords and keyphrases which online users search for. Apart from showing you how often specific keywords/phrases are searched for, it also shows the number of sites that compete for them. Wordtracker's related keyword facility will expose you to related key phrases you'd never even considered. An awesome feature is its ability to differentiate between search terms that include capitalization, word ordering and plurality.

A very user friendly tool, Wordtracker displays results beautifully - the number of searchers conducted per keyword per day, the keywords which compete with it and the KEI are all displayed in one easy to use table. You can even save multiple projects where your various keyword lists are saved, an export option even allows you to email the list to your client - goodbye cutting and pasting.

Try out the free trial.