WordTracker
is close to being a required tool for anyone that
is serious about optimizing their site(s) for the
search engines. This is because knowing how to get
good rankings is one thing - knowing which keywords
will actually bring you traffic is another.
WordTracker
provides you with details on which words and phrases
people actually use when the search for products and
information on the search engines. This information
comes from their partnership with some major meta
search engines. The database that WordTracker uses
regularly has results from over 300 million search
engine queries in it. This means that it provides
you with an excellent guide to keyword use.
Now,
there are other options for finding out what people
actually search for. The most popular is probably
Overture's search term suggestion tool. The problem
here is that many people don't really understand how
their tool works. This results in many people actually
targeting the wrong keywords.
The
main problems with Overture are:
It
doesn't separate singular and plural words. It treats
them as the same thing - the major search engines
don't.
It corrects common misspellings - most search engines
don't.
It re-orders words within a phrase. For example, it
would show nokia cell phone and cell phone nokia as
the same thing - the major search engines don't.
Now,
there are ways around the Overture problem but it
requires a good knowledge of how people think - and
a lot of guesswork. WordTracker, on the other hand,
just shows you what people search for and how many
times they did - it doesn't make any adjustments.
Here
is an example, do people search for soccer shirt or
soccer shirts? I would guess that they search for
soccer shirt. Overture shows that 2748 people searched
for soccer shirt last month - they show nothing for
soccer shirts so the numbers must be combined. According
to WordTracker, soccer shirts will be searched for
114 times each day whilst soccer shirt is only searched
for 11 times. So, following Overture, I'd make a big
mistake.
WordTracker
also offers a number of other helpful tools in addition
to it's keyword suggestion capabilities. It can also
give you an estimate of how many searches are made
on each search engine each day and it also gives you
an idea of how competitive each keyword is. The KEI
analysis as its called, seems to be based on how many
listings the search engines show. To be honest, this
isn't a great way to test the competition but it is,
in a way, useful.
WordTracker
is available as a subscription and you can choose
the length of time that you sign up for. Here is what
I would recommend. Before signing up, decide on what
your needs are. If you are adding content to a site
or creating new sites every week, I'd suggest you
go for the 12 month subscription.
If
you are just about to set up a new site and want to
do keyword research, you have the option of a daily,
weekly or monthly subscription. If you think that
one day would be enough, just make sure that you sit
down before you sign up and brainstorm a list of hundreds
of potential keywords. This will ensure that when
you do sign up, you'll be ready to get the most out
of it.
WordTracker
is a very useful tool and definitely something that
anyone who owns a site should take advantage of.