Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

A lot of tools have been created lately to help search marketers and web designers handle the ever growing realm of keyword management. Keyword management you say? I thought keywords were dead in terms of web design? Well, they probably are due to over spamming of keyword tags and if they aren’t, then most likely they have little weight in the overall scheme of web search.

However, ad and link keywords are thriving! If a web page has content, you can put some ads on it. You see them everywhere these days, even in my email. And now with the PPC and link buying markets becoming increasingly more competitive, keyword analysis has followed suit. Mostly as a result of the long tail.

So back to the tools, what are they and what can they do for me? The old standbys are Overture Keywords (guaranteed 10% uptime) and Google keywords. The new kids on the block are Keyword Discovery and Keyword Intelligence. Keyword Discover says:

“KeywordDiscovery compiles keyword search statistics from over 180 search engines world wide, to create the most powerful Keyword Research tool.”

That is very beneficial as you can get an idea of what keywords to go after at a glance on a global scale. The other tool, Keyword Intelligence is reported as:

[Being able to] spy deep inside a competitors search marketing campaign. A competitive intelligence tool from Hitwise shows you exactly which search terms are driving the most traffic to your competitors’ web sites.

Something about these feels wrong though. You are using a third party service to essentially “spy” on your competitors keyword traffic. I’m not sure to what degree KI provides this data, but it had better be at the 10,000 foot level lest they end up in a similar bind to AOL.

Happy Keyword Hunting! What are some other tools you have used to manage your keywords?