Keyword suggestion tools help you understand what words are used in search queries and what phrases are associated with those words. Keyword analytical tools provide some measure of keyword suggestion functionality, as well as the ability to understand the competition levels for specific search terms. More importantly, keyword analytics tools help you determine the relative size of the search referral market associated with specific keywords and phrases.

Read more about keyword analytics tools and how effective they might be for your site in this article at ClickZ here.

From Google Trends to Quintura, get an inside look at these free keyword suggestion tools that can help you with content optimization for your site. Read the full review of these tools at ClickZ here.

So how can you know what’s popular with searchers and what is not? The process of keyword research involves using some online tools to estimate the popularity of keywords with searchers, and then taking into account the competition for the top rankings for those keywords.

A good place to start with your research is to check the popularity of keyword searches using Overture’s Keyword Selector tool, which is a free tool available at inventory.overture.com. This tool is based on data from all searches on Yahoo! over the past month as well as other Yahoo! Search Marketing partners. While this is a huge amount of free data, the downside is that verb tenses, plural and singular forms, and misspellings are all aggregated together. What that means to you is that when using this tool you have no sense of how popular a variation of a keyword (such as a misspelling) is in comparison with the main form of the word. This can be especially frustrating if you have no sense as to how popular the plural form of a noun is versus the singular form.

A good rule of thumb is that the plural form is usually more popular than the singular form. However this is not always the case, and the degree to which that varies depends on the keyword.

Another free tool to find keyword popularity is Google’s Keyword Sandbox, available at google.com. One drawback to this tool is that it doesn’t actually return any hard numbers like the Overture tool, but it does have a place in your keyword research arsenal. Though the results of your keyword search are displayed in order of popularity, the absence of quantitative data makes it difficult to compare relative popularities in any meaningful way.

Despite its limitations, the Google tool does allow you to localize your searches based on country and language, which is a valuable tool for businesses with international sales. In addition, the Google tool will also distinguish between singular and plural forms of a word, verb tenses, and misspellings, giving you an idea of how popular each form of your keyword is. Not to mention that the Google tool is based on data collected from the largest sample of Internet searchers on the planet: the users of Google.

When it comes to selecting the best keywords, these two tools really only get us part way, but the price was right! In order to get serious you will have to part with some hard earned cash by buying a subscription to WordTracker.com (about $260).

WordTracker overcomes the verb tense, singular verses plural, and misspelling limitations of the Overture Keyword Tool. In addition it offers advanced functionality such as the ability to build projects that contain groups of keywords that you can do research on, import into Excel, and search for synonyms.

WordTracker’s database is based on searches done on the meta search engine MetaCrawler, a search engine owned by Infospace, over the last 130 days. While MetaCrawler is a minor search engine and accounts for less than 1% of the search market, there is still enough data to get statistically significant comparisons between the popularity of various keywords.

Additionally, WordTracker calculates a Keyword Effectiveness Indicator “KEI,” which allows you to take into account not just keyword popularity, but also competition for that keyword. A KEI score is simply a ratio of keyword popularity to the number of search results returned for that keyword. KEI scores are specific to each search engine, and you should run KEI scores for at least Google and Yahoo!. The higher the KEI score the more attractive the keyword is to target, assuming of course it is relevant to your business.

Using the aforementioned tools you should be able to find some great keywords that are relevant to your business and popular with searchers. However, remember that achieving a high ranking for certain keywords may not be feasible if there is a lot of competition and/or the competition is SEO savvy.

This article appeared in the November 2005 issue of Practical Ecommerce magazine.

What a gift it would be to possess photographic “peripheral memory”. Imagine being able to “remember” and explore conversations in full detail that you weren’t actually paying attention to when they occured.

Welcome to desktop search — Google desktop search, in particular. This will be a game changer for natural search optimization. For retailers, desktop search means all of a sudden, you’re playing the search game - whether by purpose or by accident.

With Google Desktop installed, any web page that your visitors have accessed, or any email they have received in their Outlook inbox (or web-based email clients like Hotmail or Yahoo mail), is now fodder for ANY future Google search they do. More importantly, those pages are given top-position on the page for keyword matches that may be - and this is the critical point - completely unrelated to what the customer was looking for when they originally visited that web page. Forget photographic memory. Peripheral memory is here.

For Google desktop users, this means that whether you intend it or not, your site and emails are already “indexed” for them by virtue of their viewing those pages. This provides the unfair advantage, the ultimate shortcut to the top of the Google results pile. No site restructuring or bloody IT battles. Just leveraging your existing customer traffic! Your mission is to make sure your copy, links, headings and titles are appropriately keyworded, in order to show up as more relevant than the OTHER sites that are in Google Desktop’s cache.

Adoption is still low. But as it grows Google Desktop (and other desktop search engines), raise the stakes for search engine optimization to keep drawing traffic. It will affect not only your web site, but your email campaigns which will also need to be carefully constructed to target the right keywords. This will enable retailers to extend the shelf life of campaigns and maximize repeat-traffic potential of existing customer visitors for months after they have forgotten about you.

Customers have better things to do than think about you all day long. Google desktop helps them “remember” things about you — things that they never even knew.

• Action vs. reaction: If a site visitor’s action results in a reaction from your web site that has a wait time exceeding that of the action, the visitor will become frustrated. That frustration will build as more . For example, clicking on the File menu tab only takes a second, so the time it takes for the menubar to appear underneath should take no more than a second.
• 80/20 rule of content: For many sites, less than 20% of the site content accounts for over 80% of the pageviews. With Microsoft.com it was 1% of their content accounted for 99% of the pageviews. In fact, 35% of their pages had never been viewed! That’s well over a million pages of content that people at Microsoft worked hard to write ? for nothing. Focus your efforts on the copy that will be read, not on the copy that won’t.
• Columns: Readers use their peripheral vision to keep track of the beginning of the next line down while they are reading across a line. So with text that has a long linewidth, it becomes difficult to read. Gerry recommends a three column format, with 20% or so of the width going to the first column (use this column for navigation), 60% or so dedicated to the middle column, and another 20% or so for the right hand column.
• Call for action: Always end your pages with a clear action for the reader to take. Never leave the reader hanging, wondering what to do next. The center column at the end of the body copy is a critical piece of real estate for these calls for action.
• Links in copy: According to Gerry, links in the middle of body copy distracts the readers making it difficult for them to read the paragraph, and it connotes “hey, click on me… the rest of this text is really boring!” Instead of embedding links within the body copy, consider using the right hand column for the related links. If there are important links there that take the reader to the “next step,” also repeat them at underneath the body copy in the center column.
• Simplicity: Einstein purportedly was quoted as saying “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Apply this idea to your web copy. Keep your copy as short and simple as possible. People tend not to read long copy on the web. With a 300 word page, 50% will read it to the end; 500 words, 20%; 1000 words, 5%. Gerry recommends headings of 4 to 8 words, summaries of 30 to 50 words, sentences of 15 to 20 words, and paragraphs of 40 to 70 words.
• “Kill your darlings”: William Faulkner once said this. If there’s a particular expression or way of saying something that you’re particularly fond of, delete it from your copy, because you’re probably overusing it.

Gerry covered so much more than this, but it would take a book to cover it all. Oh, wait a minute… there is a book covering it all. Buy Gerry’s book, Content Critical.