Over the last few days, I’ve been working extensively with a number of free keyword research tools. Now, I know there are some paid alternatives out there, but I can’t afford them, and, at any rate, I see no reason to invest into them just yet, since the research tools I’ve found so far seem to do their job just fine.

At any rate, I thought I’d take this opportunity to give something back to my readers and share the free tools I use for keyword research - who knows, those of you who’ve been living under a rock for the last few years might find them handy.

Here they are, in no particular order:

• Overture
• Wordtracker
• Digital Point (a nice combination of Wordtracker and Overture)
• SEO Book (only came across it today - seems to be very powerful)

Now, a few notes as to the functionality of these tools.

Overture is great, but it’s slow and it only pulls results from Yahoo, which means that you have no idea what people are searching for on Google (which, after all, is probably what most of you are hoping to dominate, right?) One rule of the thumb I’ve heard is to multiply the Overture number of searches by 8 to get an estimate of Google searches for the specific keyword.

Wordtracker is great as it already includes Google results - however, the free tool I linked to provides daily search count, which is not always consistent with Overture results (some phrases will appear in Wordtracker but not in Overture, and vice versa). Use at your own risk.

Digital Point is slowly becoming my favourite because it provides both Overture and Wordtracker results - however, be prepared to enter really long authentication humans to prove that you’re not a bot (can be rather annoying at times).

SEO Book provides an estimate of Google and MSN searches (although it multiplies Yahoo results by 2 to get its Google estimate, which may be too conservative an estimate). All in all, a very nifty tool, but I’ve only been using it for a while, so I’m not at all sure if their Google search calculation formula is correct.

One final note of caution - never, ever rely on just one keyword research tool! Not all of the search instruments I listed above are 100% accurate, so it’s always best to analyze what looks like a lucrative niche with another tool or two just to be on the safe side.

Well, apparently, Google is updating is algorithm and/or site rankings again, so expect to see your sites jumping up and down the results page. Some of my Squidoo lenses, in fact, have either disappeared entirely or ended up deranked to the point where they appear below EZA results.

I’m not sure if this is a temporary fluke - based on what people have told me, it should be - or a more ominous sign of Squidoo’s popularity with Google proving to be short-lived. Without being too pessimistic, let’s be honest here for a minute - a site that is free, does not require content approval and beats EZA in search engine results - isn’t that too good to be true?

Hopefully it isn’t - but I’ll keep an eye out on how my lenses are doing and update you accordingly.

EDIT: Just moments after I made this post, I checked how one of my lenses is doing - it reappeared in Google at long last (it was gone for several days), however it is now on the second page of Google results, whereas before the update started it was ranked as the first result for the keyphrase it was optimised around. A temporary algorithm fluke or a permanent deranking of Squidoo pages?

On a side note, I know I haven’t updated this blog in a few days. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa - I have been extremely busy with my current writing contract (which is, for the lack of a better word, massive), and, on top of that, I have university exams coming up next week as well as my lovely girlfriend who definitely deserves more attention than I was able to give her over the last few days. However, if all goes as planned, I should have a relatively free weekend, so you can expect some content updates soon.

No, I’m not talking about surfing here, but rather about the importance that long-tail keyphrases can play in your search engine optimization efforts.

What’s a long-tail keyphrase? Suppose, for example, that you had an article-writing blog and decided to optimize it around the seemingly most logical keyword - “articles”. Sadly, if you were to do that, you’d find yourself competing against 905,000,000 other sites in Google, with FindArticles.com - a PR8 site - getting the top spot.

Obviously, you will need to optimize your site around something less competitive that still gets the meaning across. After all, you want targeted traffic, right? So, imagine then trying to optimize your blog around the keyphrase “writing articles” - you’ll find yourself competing with 1,110,000 other sites, with Goarticles.com being the first.

But here’s one important observation - the second you made your keyphrase longer by adding another word to it, your competition went down by 899 million!

And that, my friends, is the whole purpose of a long-tail keyphrase. You may be surprised, but people enter long search strings into Google every day. For example, there is no way I could ever hope to compete for the term “articles” - however, if you were to Google up the phrase “how to write and sell articles”, you’d find my Squidoo lens at the very top of Google search results.

Long-tail keywords are amazing in their capacity to attract targeted traffic without having to compete with bigger and more established sites. Instead of facing them head-on, you’re pretty much slipping under the radar, and getting far more targeted traffic than they are.