News you can use - Keyword Tool Roundup!

How many keywords do you have?

100, 5000, 100,000 - perhaps you’ve got a million keywords?

Where did you get them?

Overture, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Keyword Domination, NicheBot 2.0, Wordze or some other service?

I’m going to let you in on a secret that the pros know but don’t tell anyone…

Overture Sucks

I’m sure you’ve seen all the “guru’s” pimping overture at some point in time saying how great it is for keyword research. And yet I’m telling you the opposite of that. Why?

Have you looked at the results that Overture provides for you? I mean, really looked at them?

The first problem is that they alphabetize the phrases. So if you’ve got a keyword phrase like “fly fishing in south georgia” it’ll end up as “fly fishing in georgia south”.

It may not seem like a big deal but when a user types in “fly fishing in south georgia”, the exact phrase matches will rank before the broad phrases.

Another problem with Overture is that it does not give you the plurals of words.

The bottom line is that if you’re using Overture to do your keyword research you’re losing money.

Incidentally, there’s been a bit of news recently that Overture is allowing you to do keyword research in multiple languages. Keep a watch on these pages for info on why that tool may soon be surpassed by something better.

Wordtracker

The next one on the list is Wordtracker. Some people swear by this service. It’s good if you’re doing a small number of searches but if you’ve ever tried to do any bulk research like digging into keywords to get the long tail - well, you’re in for a long, painful, slow search.

The problem is that Wordtracker does not let you get all the long tail keywords by digging into a single keyword. Sure, it’s got KEI and the word counts but if you really want to crank the pages out (volume volume volume for traffic!) then you need a better tool.

Keyword Discovery

I happen to like this service and it is good for bulk searches unfortunately it’s also rather expensive. I would only recommend this tool for those people who have cash to burn.

Also, you’ll need a decent script written to access their service if you want to do bulk searches.

Of course, if you’re lazy you could use…

Keyword Domination

You can think of this tool as a script that’s been pre-written for you to access Keyword Discovery. Yeah, it works but it’s even more expensive than Keyword Domination.

The sales page also lies about what you get so I would not recommend this service at all. It’s so bad I didn’t want to link to it above!

NicheBot 2.0

With version 2.0 just released, NicheBot has some interesting features. It’s been around the block a few times and has quite a few plugins that make it something to keep in mind. It’ll interface with Overture and Keyword Discovery. Of course, synching up with Keyword Discovery does cost you extra but it’s not as expensive as Keyword Domination.

To be honest, I haven’t used this tool as much as I could have in the past several months even though I was in the beta for quite some time. Thus, I can’t give you a thumbs up or down on it. I will say that, Jim Morris, the owner of this service is a great guy and offers some great support. I believe he really cares about his customers - a rare thing in the world today.

WordZe

This is actually my favorite service. Of the five services listed above, it has the cleanest interface, is the fastest and also costs the least.

You can dig into keywords and get thousands ready for download in mere minutes. Unlike Wordtracker, with this service you won’t have to click click click to get things done.

It also has a very cool feature that lets you know how many links you’d need to build per month to get your site to rank on a particular search term.

G-Man