While Yahoo! Search Marketing Keyword Selector Tool offers some insights into what keywords search engine users entered into its partner sites, more advanced web publishers would want a more powerful tool.

If you are doing search engine stuff for some time, you will almost certainly heard about Wordtracker.

Recent years, we have seen a lot of keyword services appear, especially since AdSense become one of the most common monetization models for content publishing among small to medium website owners.

What is Wordtacker?

Wordtracker is a paid keyword research service that gathers its data from meta search engines such as Metacrawler and Dogpile.

The data represent only a small percentage of total searches on the Internet. Wordtracker collects about 300-350 million searches over 8-week rolling cycle, which averages about 6.25 million searches per day. Compare this to Google, which gets more than 90-150 million searches per day (numbers vary from different sources).

Nevertheless, the web-based service has been proven very useful in giving ideas for additional keywords for your website or blog.

What is interesting about Wordtracker is that it tells you how competitive those keywords are and the actual number of searches for the keywords in the past 24 hours.

The service also has a measurement about how competitive each keyword is. KEI, which stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index, calculates the number of times a keyword has appeared in Wordtracker’s database compared to the number of competing web pages.

Generally, the higher the KEI the better. Wordtracker suggests that a KEI of around 100 is good and anything above 400 is excellent.

The Benefits

Although the database behind Wordtracker web-based service is relatively small, it is one of the most powerful keyword research tool available on the Internet right now.

Like Yahoo! Keyword Selector Tool, it allows you to locate a lot of keywords and their variations quickly. It also includes a thesaurus tool so you can search for similar keywords or synonyms and get more ideas on how to approach building web pages around those keywords.

For example, you can identify many alternative keywords combinations that may be used in your vertical niche. You can also find information about how often the keyword has been searched during the last 24 hours.

Perhaps the most overlook feature is the ability to print, save and email keyword lists you have collected.

Price

Wordtracker offers 4 subscription options:

1. 1 day: $7.94 / £4.20
2. 1 week: $26.48 / £14.00
3. 1 month: $52.95 / £28.00
4. 1 year: $264.77 / £140.00

This service also comes with 30-day money back guarantee. Note that the price in US dollar might change as the currency fluctuates.

How to Use Wordtracker

In this section, we are going to cover the most basic use of Wordtracker. Keep in mind this is a powerful tool. You could use it immediately to collect keywords but still in order to effectively take advantage of its true power, you need to learn it — which involve a bit of learning curve.

The simples way to start with this keyword tool is the Keyword Universe or Keyword Projects option. The process involves several steps:

1. Find related keywords.
Enter a generic term. A good approach is to start generic and proceed with more specific terms. The great thing about Wordtracker is that it automatically provides a list of alternative keywords.

2. Dig deeper for basic information and add selected keyphrases to your basket.
In this step, you dig into the list of keywords from the initial step above. Examine how many searches there have been for the keyphrase in the last month or 24 hours.

3. Review and print/email.
Review what you have in your basket. Save and print this list for reference. Wordtracker also lets you email the list to your email address or export to a file of your choice.

4. Analyze keyword or niche competitiveness.
This step is important, especially if you are just starting and don’t have the necessary resources and motivation to compete.

In very competitive niches, it could take years before you see results if you don’t have the budget and want to do it your own. So, choose a light niche with relatively less competition to start with. You can also start from a moderately competitive niche but target less crowded keywords.

Asses the KEI indicator to see how likely are you to rank with those keywords in the search engines or directories.

That’s it. To use Wordtracker to the fullest, you need the full and paid version. However, if you want to get a free trial, you can test it but with a far stripped down version that in my opinion, you won’t get much from it.