Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I just noticed a comment from a few days ago on my post about the WordTracker free keyword tool. It was from Hilton at Trellian, the makers of Keyword Discovery. He mentioned that they have also jumped on bandwagon and are offering a free version of their tool. Well, it's about time. It's a good time to catch people's attention as Yahoo's tool is working only some of the time and may go down forever any day now (we'll see if it really happens) it's been 50/50 on whether it works for me the past couple weeks.

I've used Keyword Discovery for a while and I've been happy with it. The price of the paid version is more than WordTracker, but I like the ability to save a lot more projects and it's a lot more user friendly for building keyword lists. I have my doubts about the freshness of their data (is it really the most recent 12 months?), and I don't know exactly where their data is coming from. Their database of searches is pretty big--supposedly going back 12 months--but it's still a tiny sample compared to the total number of actual searches. This could cause issues of low searches or no searches for smaller niche keywords, but overall the tool does a pretty good job of offering up ideas on keywords to optimize your site for.

Also, I should mention one of the best aspects of this tool compared to the Overture tool is that they don't lump together misspellings and plurals. They show you the actual searches for words so you can see how people are actually searching.

Give the keyword tool a test drive

Labels: free tools, keyword research, keyworddiscovery, keywords