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Researching Keywords
Brainstorming keywords that seem relevant to your web site may help to identify keywords to target
in a search engine marketing campaign. However, the actual keywords used by web searchers may be
surprising more often than not. Fortunately, tools are available that mine available search data and
conveniently allow one to peruse both related keywords as well as their respective query volumes.
Such services include:
?
Wordtracker (
http://www.wordtracker.com
)
?
Keyword Discovery (
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com
)
?
The Yahoo! Search Marketing Keyword Tool (
http://inventory.overture.com/
)
Both Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery are fee-based tools that tap into various smaller search engines
to assemble their data. The latter is a free tool that uses the data from Yahoo! Search Marketing’s pay-per-
click network; Figure 2-7 shows this tool in action for the keyword “seo.”
Because none of these tools are immune to data anomalies — and even deliberate manipulation — it may
be wise to use two tools and some intuition to assess whether the data is real. For more information on
using keyword research tools effectively, we recommend reading
Search Engine Optimization An Hour a
Day
(Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2006) by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin.
Figure 2-7
32
Chapter 2: A Primer in Basic SEO
c02.qxd:c02 10:39 32


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