In search engine optimization, choosing the right keywords is one of the most important steps. The obvious reason is that if you use keywords that don't get searched for very often, you won't get any traffic. Second, if your keywords are too popular, it will be very hard (almost impossible) to get high rankings. So how do we find the middle ground between the two problems? Keyword tools could help with this, but how accurate are they?
Wordtracker, Overture Keyword Tool, and Trellian Keyword Discovery are the best keyword research tools on the market right now. Now, I bet a lot of you are pulling out your hair trying to figure out which keywords will be good for optimization. The fact that the results from the three different keyword tools are different probably makes it even more stressful. For example, one keyword tool may show that a certain keyword is very good, while another tool may show a completely different result for the same keyword. Well, stop worrying now! The truth is that we don't really know how accurate these keyword tools are, and we should only use their search volume numbers to see if a keyword is popular among people who use search engines.
Let's say that the Overture Keyword Tool shows that the phrase "dog products" is searched for 5,000 times per month. To make an assumption that "dog products" is a good keyword for optimisation, based ONLY on the Overture figure, would be a very bad assumption. But it gives us a rough idea of how often that keyword is searched for. The next step would be to check with Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery to see if "dog products" has a similar number of searches (remember to convert searches for each tool to a common time frame i.e. monthly or daily). If both Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery show a very low search volume, I would be very sceptical about using "dog products" for optimization. The whole point is to make sure that at least two of the three keyword tools show a reasonable or high number of searches for that keyword before considering it for optimization. If "dog products" shows up on all three keyword tools with a reasonable or high number of searches, it's likely that this keyword has a reasonable or high number of searches and should be thought about for optimization.
After using keyword tools to come up with a good list of keywords, you should focus on the keywords that have a low or reasonable number of competing web pages. There is no point in trying to compete for a keyword that is already being used by 1,000,000 web pages. You could get a high rank for that keyword if you were good at SEO, but it would take a lot of time and money that you could spend on better things. The less competition there is, the more likely it is that you will move up the ranks.
To sum up, there is no reason to think that keyword tools are always right. Even though the person selling the tool might say otherwise, I doubt it. The results should be taken with a "grain of salt" because they only help you get an idea of how many times a certain keyword might be searched (high, moderate or low). Since each tool uses a different algorithm to get its results, sometimes their results will not match up. If you use at least two of the keyword tools to find out how often people search for keywords, you should be able to make a good decision about whether or not to optimise for a keyword. Keeping this in mind, it would also be smart to use common sense to figure out if a keyword is one that YOU would actually use in a search. If that wasn't the case, what would be the point of optimization?
