In various sites you find keyword suggestion tools that are intended to help you to find popular keywords with high traffic. None of these tools are referring to Google.com, Yahoo.com, Live.com ( MSN ) or ask.com nor any other major search engine. Typically the data they use to create the help for you comes from minor search engines such as Wordtracker or Overture. FYI: Workdtracker uses data from dogpile and metacrawler - 2 old but tiny search engines - tiny compared to Google search traffic.

A brief example of how inaccurate and ridiculous such tools' result can be:

These days I have a keyword-pair that directly relates to the season / holidays and appears to be Google USA #1 and #2 and in other global Google search databasis at least in the top 3-5 - typically out of about 8 Million competing pages.

Here is what one most commonly used keyword suggestion tool says about the traffic potential:

• Wordtracker: No data for phrase
• Overture: 17.9 /day

What is the real traffic on these keywords compared to predictions from the keyword suggestion tool:

Google alone sent me yesterday a total of 4468 visitors for these keywords ...

Now you have to keep in mind that this is in no way to total use of the keyword pair - this above number is just my tiny share of the total searches made on Google using the keywords for that particular single page. The total number of searches made the same day - 17 December 2007 - may be 10-15 times higher. That is but a guess from a www oldie and no exact statistical data!

That shows and proves that many tools on the www are of zero use and zero validity - even insufficient to give you a "clue" or rough idea about a traffic potential in Internet for a particular topic or keyword!

Why this extreme discrepancy between a keyword suggestion tool and reality ?

The answer is simple: The major SE avoid giving secrets away - and the "hobby-search engines" that offer access to their databases do so to attract visitors and thus in an attempt to survive in the search engine world. No reasonable person would use such minor SE to find important data. Dynamic professionals use Google, conservative people are happy with inaccurate partial results - hence they use Yahoo, people with no idea about search engines use the built in search or their factory pre-installed windows operating system - hence they use live.com. The number of users of the 2 small search engines used for the most common keyword tool is so tiny and the type of person so exceptional and out of the average person, that under no circumstances a mathematical model could be made to calculate or near-accurately guess the real number of searches for any keyword out there.

I was using now and then that tool myself - but never applied the results found. Now after a precise research I know why.

My recommendation:

Follow your intuition - do what you love to do and do what you love to do with all possible care and efforts and you WILL succeed!

Enjoy

hans

Previous posts and follow-up articles on successful web publishing

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