As I mentioned over on Searchlight, Yahoo Suggest is a quick-n-dirty, free keyword research tool that can serve as a nice alternative to Google Suggest. Google Suggest has Yahoo Suggest beat for convenience if you have the Google Toolbar installed, since you just start typing keystrokes into the toolbar's search field and it displays a dropdown list of suggestions (think: auto-complete). The suggestions are listed in order of popularity. This was how my daughter Chloe identified her top search term, "neopets cheats" for naming her site ("The Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site") - Google Suggest showed that "neopets cheats" was the second most popular search term after "neopets". But with Google Suggest, you can only compare search terms that start with the same keystrokes. You can't compare, say, "new cars" with "used cars". In that regard, Yahoo Suggest has a leg up on Google Suggest, since it returns search terms where your keystrokes may be in the middle or end. Try it out: go to Yahoo's home page or the Yahoo Search page and start typing in the search box.

I demoed this tool at my presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, but the demo didn't quite work as expected. I typed in "cars", and as you can see below in the screenshot, the results were pretty bad. In particular, it was with suggestion #3 - "toyota car malaysia new car cars" - that I lost faith in this tool's data for keyword research.

Keyword research is often overlooked by many new SEOs as being too basic, a waste of time. They do not understand why anyone would need a list of 10,000 words. What could anyone ever do with that? This is where many new SEOs are confused because as any experienced SEO knows - keyword research is so much more than just a list of words. Generating the keyword universe is only the first step. From there you must do a couple more things – finding the competition and search volume for each of these words.

The end goal of all of this time spent doing research is to be able to target the keywords/phrases that have high search volume and low competition. To old SEOs the importance of this seems obvious – lower the competition the more easy it is to rank highly – the higher you rank the more traffic you will get.

I suppose it’s the seemingly tedious nature of the keyword research that turns off people who are just learning about SEO. It sounds overwhelming to those who are not comfortable with or do not know about the right tools.

There are plenty of great tools out there for making keyword research easy, if not enjoyable. I've blogged before about some of these tools, but I'll specifically mention a couple of them again - KeywordDiscovery.com and WordTracker.com. Neither are very expensive and they are very helpful at generating some great keyword lists. When it comes to which is better it really comes down to a matter of opinion as they both work very well, are simple to use, and both do similar things. If you have the budget, use both and compare the data between them.

We all know that keywords are important for on-page optimization, but did you know that they can also influence file names, links, and a website's architecture? With that much importance placed on the words used, many SEO gurus believe that keyword research involves hours of endless projects to find targeted keywords and keyword phrases.
In this article on my CNET:Searchlight blog, I talk about how you don't have to block out hours of time to do keyword research, and cover some of the useful "free" tools available on the web.

One of our favorite services for keyword research is WordTracker and they have come out with a new e-book — all 75 pages packed with tips and techniques for doing keyword research. Contributors to the ebook include Bryan Eisenberg, BL Ochman, Kevin Lee and Nick Usborne.

Download the keyword research guide here.