Top 7 Free Keyword Research Tools

December 18, 2007

There are hundreds or thousands of keyword tools on the market, so I decided to write about the keyword tools I use more often. To get the most out of these keywords you need test them and see which ones suit your needs. I have ordered them according to how I use them in a typical keyword research project:

Keyword Discovery

A far better alternative to the Overture keyword tool, it is more accurate because collates data from over 200 search engines including foreign languages and regional ones. It is great for the initial keyword research steps enabling you to build comprehensive initial keyword lists.

Keyword Nortometer

This tool analyses the top sites for any given keyword and displays the most common keywords used on those sites, it helps you narrowing down your keyword list and getting ideas about what you should be writing about on your web site.

Keyword Competition Check

This tool gives you statistics about up to 10 top ranked websites for any given keyword, it gathers data such as PageRank, Google and Yahoo! backlinks, site saturation, directory submissions and other relevant SEO metrics and also shows a cool graphic display of this data. In essence it tells you how optimised your competitors are.

GTrends Tool from Wordtracker

GTrends is a mashup that combines data from Wordtracker and Google Trends. It compares the number of potential clickthroughs for a number one position in Google against the number of phrase match results. This keyword tool is focused on finding niche markets and it's not so relevant for bigger markets.

Keyword Density

Well as the name indicates this keyword analyses the density of keywords on any given web site. I use it for checking if a site is well optimised and to generate different keyword combinations.

SpyFu

"Spy on your online competitors", this tool tells you which keywords your competitors are bidding on and which ones they're ranking for in natural search results. It gives you a host of useful data such as average CPC, number of Adwords advertisers, other keywords bought by your competitors for PPC and also gives you the top 10 Google natural results, related terms among other things.

Keyword Optimizer

This tool simply remove duplicate entries and re-order the list alphabetically, great time-saver!

These are the tools that work for me for most SEO projects. What about you? What keyword tools do you normally use?

Tino
SEO Programmer