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Keyword Research tools: a Beginner Guide   by Arvind Sharma

When you initiate the process of creating a new website that caters to a niche audience, you must spend sometime analyzing the keywords and phrases that are not in competition. To improve your website's ranking in the search engine, you must target the keywords that relate most aptly to your site's nature. This perceptibly increases the traffic and hence better number of sales.

We all know that keywords are the basic phrases that users type in the search engine box to find products, services and information. This is the most important step of any interactive advertising campaign. However, you must understand how to identify with the keywords that users might use. Secondly locating the keywords that determine the search behaviour. Third is to choose the perfect keywords from the sorted keywords and intermingling between the phrases. Whatever it may be, it is always suggested to use a few important keyword research tools:

AdWords Keyword Tool
The Adwords keyword tool works in such a way that you need to enter a few of your keywords and it provides you a whole listing of suggestions that come along with statistics of traffic and competition. This tool was initially created for pay per click advertisers but works well for normal SEO as well.

Google Search based Keyword Tool
This is a tool that comes from Google and that suggests key phrases based on the searches of users. There are two approaches to this tool: firstly you can simply enter your chosen keywords and get recommendations from the tool and the other is to enter the URL of your site so that it can locate key phrases in your site's content and make suggestions from it.

Keyword Discovery
This tool presents collective statistics for traffic for all major search engines. It then recommends new key words based on this data. It also has features such as a calculator to judge keyword effectiveness, competition research and evaluation of PPC bids.

Wordtracker
This is a well known tool for researching keywords. Wordtracker has similar features of AdWords keyword tool and keyword discovery however Wordtracker makes use of meta search engines, for example Dogpile. This is done to assess the searches for key phrases and suggestion of keywords.

Google Suggest
Google Suggest is not exactly a keyword research tool however it allows one to discover new terms for searches that you probably might miss out on. When you log on to Google, and start typing out a keyword for search, you will see a toolbar appearing with a list of keyword suggestions. That is what Google Suggest is all about. These suggestions made by Google are on the basis on searches made by actual users and which serve to be helpful for any online marketer.

Yahoo! Search Assist
This is a keyword research tool provided by Yahoo which is just the same as Google. This is particularly for people whose target audience is Yahoo based and thus the search trend.

Rank Tracker
Tank Tracker is another SEO tool which allows you to reach all the above mention tools for researching keyword. Keyword suggestions can be generated by making use of any of the above tools and further on keyword research mechanisms can also be accessed such as word mixer and misspellings. Rank Tracker helps in calculating keyword efficient index (KEI) which suggests the popularity of each keyword and how difficult it is to get high rank using it. It also has the option of monitoring the position of your website.

About the Author

Author has vast experience in the offshore IT outsourcing and its methodology and digital marketing strategies. He is currently associated with a full service Digital Agency in India that combines brand design and corporate identity design agency under one roof.
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