Your keyword research will ultimately determine how (and if) visitors find your site.

Your job at this stage of the site building process is to figure out the exact phrases that people type in search engines when they search for information or products related to your niche.

Example. His website is about fly fishing. In it, you promote fishing tackle, rods, reels, etc. If I were a fly fisherman looking to buy a reel, what am I going to Google to find relevant sites where I can buy a reel? After all, that’s what you need to know as the webmaster behind a fly fishing site.

You could write any of the following:

fly fishing reel

buy fly fishing reel

fly fishing reel review

and so on.

However, just because you think of a phrase related to this niche, it doesn’t mean that someone is actually looking for that phrase. That’s where keyword research tools come in. Your research will not only highlight the phrases that are actually being searched for, but it will also find many more phrases than you could realistically come up with yourself, and in a fraction of the time.

How many phrases related to “fly fishing reel” can you think of? 5? 10 in a push?

Well, I just went through Wordtracker, and within seconds, it returned 68 sentences that people are searching for. This is pure gold!

Wordtracker also gives me essential data, such as how many people are searching for each phrase and how many competing web pages there are for each term.

I have 100% faith in the data returned by Wordtracker based on the results I’ve seen for various keywords I’ve been targeting over the years. I can’t say the same for other keyword tools that use Overture’s Tip tool for “demand” data, so before using a free keyword research tool, read the following true story:

“A couple of years ago, I did keyword research for a web page I was building on pheromones. I was going to send my traffic to a merchant site and get commission on any sales generated. Using the Overture tool, I found 4 or more 5 terms with more than 47,000 searches in the last weeks … and that’s only on Overture.

I thought, hey, great. There should be multiple times this number of searches originating from Google. I created a couple of pages and optimized them. I was ranked # 1 on MSN, and later # 1 on Google as well for some of my chosen terms.

When I saw my rating, I could see the $$$ signs in front of my eyes. Two days later, I had received only 6 visitors to my top ranking pages. My millions were melting before my eyes.

I reviewed WordTracker and found that in the last month, there have only been 41 searches for my main keyword according to Wordtracker (1-2 searches per day). “

Let’s take a quick example – you can test it yourself if you want.

Look for the Overture tool for “fly fishing reel”. These are the 3 main results I get:

fly fishing reel 5179

fly fishing rods and reel 377

saltwater fly fishing reel 126

Overture data is measured for the previous month. To get comparable data in Wordtracker, I found out how many times Wordtracker estimates that the phrase is searched on Google in 24 hours and multiplied by 30.

Here’s what Wordtracker returns for those top 3 Overture sentences (Google searches per month):

fly fishing reels 390

fly fishing rods and reels 60

saltwater fly fishing reels 120

For the phrase “fly fishing reel,” Overture says it was searched 5179 times in January, while Wordtracker brings that number closer to 390.

For the phrase “fly fishing rods and reels”, Overture says 377, Wordtracker says 60.

For the phrase “seawater fly fishing reels”, Overture says 126, Wordtracker says 120.

Go ahead and try it yourself

Not convinced? What I suggest you do is try this experiment with several different sentences.

For example, my earlier Overture search for “pheromone” suggests that the phrase pheromone was searched 54,905 times last month.

Wordtracker estimates that pheromones were searched on Google 5,940 times in one month.

Who do I trust? Wordtracker, of course.

While the two measurements cannot be directly compared (as they provide search information based on different engines), I have found that the number reported by Wordtracker correlates very well with the traffic I receive when I get number 1 on Google.

So where does all this leave all the keyword tools that are available?

Here are some tips on choosing a keyword research tool.

If you find a keyword tool that looks promising, ask yourself:

1. Does this tool also provide supply and demand figures for each sentence?

Without supply and demand, phrases are useless, because there is no way to choose the phrases with the highest demand and least competition from the list. Many of the phrases can have hundreds of thousands of competing pages on Google. If you don’t have these figures, how can you accurately target the sentences?

If supply and demand are supplied, the next question is:

2. Where does the demand data come from?

You can quickly verify this by running a search in the tool and Overture, and comparing the numbers. If the demand figures are the same, you know that demand recovered from Overture.

If the data comes from Overture, would you trust it?

I have not yet found a tool as good or accurate as Wordtracker for keyword research.