How to Find Keywords

For-Fee Services

While most of the search engine tools we’ve discussed are either free or available at low cost, there are other options for finding keywords that require payment.  While these may be costly, the website marketer should at least spend time evaluating them since these are popular among many search engine optimization professionals.

• Subscription Services – Several Internet sites offer keyword help by analyzing searches in ways that differ from the methods used by the top three search engine tools.  The leader among these services is Wordtracker which compiles information from searches done through several lower level search engines.  Along the same lines as Wordtracker is KeywordDiscovery which claims to gather information from a large number of search engines, though most of what they do is based on deals they have made with Internet Service Provides, who are able to record search queries in an indirect way and then share this information with KeywordDiscovery.
• Research Reports – At a cost that far exceeds the Subscription Services are the reports offered by Internet research companies.  These reports are not cheap and probably only of interest to the well-funded website marketer.  The leading option is Hitwise, which produces monthly reports by industry including analysis of search terms.  Like KeywordDiscovery, Hitwise gathers its data from relationships with Internet Service Providers but also utilizes software installed on many websites and computers.

Free Web Tools

There are many free tools on the Internet that offer help with keyword search.  Here are a few:

• Google Suggest - In addition to the keyword tools offered in its advertising area, Google offers an interesting feature called Google Suggest, which offers suggested alternative words to what a users enters in the search box.  The fun part of this feature is that it works as the user types.
• DigitalPoint – This site is mostly oriented to techie-types, but it does offer a number of tools that marketers will find interesting.  For keywords there is a nice tool that combines Yahoo’s Keyword Selector tool and Wordtracker to give keyword suggestions.  The tool not only lists suggested words but goes a step further and indicates per-day search frequency for each suggestion.