Free Keyword Research Tools of Choice

Posted on | December 10, 2007 |

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It’s nearly been a year since my favorite keyword research tool Overture stopped being updated so I thought I might share some of the tools that I’ve discovered since. I liked Overture for its ease of use. Sure, it was a little unreliable at times but I would always forgive.

You’ll notice that it still says January 2007 even though its December 2007. So i moved on to Wordtracker who had coincidentally started offering their own free keyword research tool. They claim to pull in results from www.dogpile.com and metacrawler.com and then make an estimate based on the fact that these 2 search engines claim 0.63% of all web searches.

As you can see, it works, which is good but the results tend to be pretty crappy and overall not a very good indicator for how people are searching. I’ll still use it every now and again but certainly don’t rely on it. Not surprisingly, their paid option is a lot better.

Trellian’s Keyword Discovery tool is probably my favorite at the moment. While their methodology is a little vague, their results are leaps ahead of the others. Their free option should suffice unless you live and breathe keyword research like us and the $70 a month is well worth it, especially as it offers a whole slew of other very useful tools.

A couple of bonus keyword selection tools include SEO Book’s self-proclaimed “coolest keyword research tool” which pulls in estimates based off Overture so one questions how current the results are. Still, it ties in other services like Wordtracker, Keyworddiscovery and Google Adwords Suggest Tool which offers a scale of low, medium and high volume searches.

So there’s a little overview for you to get you started.

UPDATE: I forgot about MSN Labs (how could you!)