(Photo Credit: Jeff McNeill) This is a special edition of SEO University where I have a guest post by Elisa Gabbert. Elisa was introduced to me by Byron Gordon, a great guy who I’ve worked with for a couple of years at the Search Engine Strategies conferences here in Toronto. When Byron asks me to check something out, it’s usually good!

Byron said I should check out WordStream’s new keyword tool located at http://www.wordstream.com/keywords. For years I’ve been a fan of using Google’s free tools, namely the Google Keyword Tool and the Google Traffic Estimator Tool. They are both free, provide great data, and it comes directly from Google – what more could you ask for?

I posed the question to Byron and he put me on to Elisa who wrote this guest post. I look forward to your thoughts on WordStream vs. Google after you read the post.

“At WordStream, we recently launched a new free keyword tool. One of the questions we get asked frequently is how the tool compares to the Google keyword tool (in fact it gets asked so frequently we put it in the FAQ).

Let me try to run down the pros and cons of using each tool.

Where Google’s Tool Is Better

Google’s keyword tool is similar to many of their products in that it has two core strengths: it uses Google data, and they give it away for free. If you’re in a market (and there are many) where Google is the dominant player, having access to Google’s data can definitely be useful. And Google has a lot of data.

The tool also provides several columns of numerical stats including both local and global monthly search volume and search volume trends, as well as information like advertiser competition and estimated average CPC which can be useful for the PPC advertiser. Aside from keywords and related terms, WordStream’s tool currently only shows you an estimated relative volume.

Where WordStream’s Tool Is Better

Google’s keyword tool taps into the company’s huge data sources, but they’re not giving you full access to that data. For example, a search for “britney spears” returns 72 results. Performing the same search on our tool yields over 37,000 keywords. We only show you the top 100 within the tool itself, but you can enter your email (or sign up for a free account) and we’ll send you the full list, all 37,563 keyword phrases, free of cost. So we are giving you a lot more to work with, including many long-tail terms, and this is really valuable for large PPC accounts or affiliate marketers especially.

Another advantage to our keyword tool is a greater diversity of keyword sources. We aggregate search query data from Internet Service Providers, browser toolbars and search engines—amounting to more than a billion unique keywords and over a trillion search queries—and we carefully weight the data to avoid bias toward any particular source. So our data is more comprehensive.

The “related keywords” feature allows you to select related terms and synonyms and include them in the results with your original query. Again, this is important for keyword expansion and can tell you what other phrases your audience may be using to search for related topics.

There’s also a filter feature so you can weed out terms that aren’t relevant to your search.

Finally, WordStream’s keyword tool is faster than Google’s. You get results pretty much instantaneously.

In the end, the point of using any of these tools is to get keyword suggestions, and it’s important to remember that they are in fact just suggestions—many of them may be irrelevant to your website or business. The more data you start out with, the more usable, actionable keywords you’re going to end up with after you drill down and figure out which terms are going to be most relevant and valuable for you. Then you can get to work optimizing your web copy and PPC campaigns based on those keywords, which in turn gives you more data to analyze (like which keywords drive the most traffic and conversions, and which aren’t delivering any value). This creates a cycle of data-driven decision making.

Our view is that keywords in and of themselves aren’t worth anything. It’s what you do with your keyword list that matters. That’s why we developed the tool. We hope that dedicated search marketers will stick around to learn the benefits of keyword management—tools and strategies that help you group, organize and act on all that raw keyword data to get real results in return.”

Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream, a software manufacturer specializing in keyword discovery & management software for SEO and PPC. To get in touch with Elisa, you can send a note to egabbert at wordstream dot com, follow her on twitter, or check out the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog, where she’s a regular contributor.

What do you think about the WordStream Keyword Tool? Are you going to give it a try? I would love to hear your thoughts on the tool if you comment below!

In my last SEO University (SES Toronto – Day 2 – SEO University) post I promised that I would provide you with a comprehensive list of the top free / cheap tools for building your business online. The recommendations come from Ken Jurina, a founder of Epiar and one of the panelists at Search Engine Strategies Toronto’s session: Tool Time: The Search Marketer’s Free-to-Cheap Goodie Bag. Ken’s presentation was my favorite from last year’s conference and I was excited to see what new tools he had to recommend.

• 1) Firefox Extensions (https://addons.mozilla.org/en‐US/firefox/) – Add-ons are extensions of the browser that add new functionality to Firefox or change its appearance
• Pros: Tools work right within your browser, very quick, very powerful, and very free
• Critiques: None ‐ critiques usually resolved with extension updates
• Cool: Audit a clients site live: SE issues, opt. improvement – SEO Extensions: SEOpen, Search Status, Web Developer, Groowe Toolbar, CustomizeGoogle, SEO Quake – Others: PDF Download, Google Image Preview, Roboform
  
• Cost: FREE

• 2) IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com/) – IceRocket is an Internet search engine specialized in searching blogs.
  
• Pros: Real‐time monitoring of blogs/social media, Link, topic & trend tracking tools
• Critiques: Can’t search videos directly, Some searches take up to a minute to load
• Cool: BigBuzz Search
• Cost: FREE

• 3) Google Geo Search (http://www.contentranch.com/google-geo-search-tool/) – The Google Search Tool is a simple tool that creates a url to the official google search page based on the location and data center you choose.
• Pros: Search Google by region, Simple to use, quick and streamlined
• Critiques: None
• Cool: No ads, No clutter
• Cost: FREE
  

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• 4) Domain Report Tool (http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm) – The Domain Report tool will check Google, Yahoo! Search and Live Search to see how many pages for each site are indexed in each engine.
• Pros: Tally & compare search engine indexing, Determine competitor search presence
• Critiques: No export option, Can take up to 5 minutes
• Cool: Free! Even without ‘Bruce Clay’ subscription
• Cost: FREE
  

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• 5) BackTweets (http://backtweets.com/) – Search for links on Twitter.
• Pros: Search Twitter for links to your site, See’s through compressed URL’s, Sort results by date or user
• Critiques: None
• Cool: Set up regular RSS updates
• Cost: FREE
  

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• 6) Know’em (http://knowem.com/) – KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular Social Media websites.
• Pros: Check brand‐name availability for 120 social networks, Very quick and easy!
• Critiques: Occasional network error when pinging site(s)
• Cool: Promote brand cohesiveness, Monitor brand/identity theft, Can automatically register your username for extra$$
• Cost: FREE

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  7) Backlink Checker Tool (http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php) – Enables webmasters to check their pagerank, monitor the PR of competitor’s backlinks, estimate a value of their site, and more.
• Pros: Quickly oversee a site’s backlinks, Show which links have the ‘nofollow’ tag, List anchor text for incoming links as well as their PageRank
• Critiques: Don’t forget the ‘http://’ or it returns no results
• Cool: Smartpagerank.com also has other useful tools
• Cost: FREE

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  8) SpyFu (http://www.spyfu.com/) – Spy on your online competitors and download competitors keywords and adwords.
• Pros: Great competitive insight on PPC & Organic, Works in browser, quick & thorough, Free stuff is good – though you can subscribe for more
• Critiques: Busy interface, Not intuitive as to what a particular button/tool does
• Cool: Dashboard: charts and data mash‐ups
• Cost: FREE plus subscription options

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  9) GSiteCrawler (http://www.spyfu.com/) - Windows Generator for Google SiteMap Files.
• Pros: Crawl simulation provides detailed spidey‐vision, View canonical and duplicate content issues, aborted URLs, page, file sizes and more, Automatic XML sitemap creation
• Critiques: Large sites may take a few hours and need to be run overnight, Crawlers will get stuck in a loop on sites with dynamic URLs
• Cool: One‐stop audit shop, Exports multiple reports
• Cost: FREE

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  10) Google Insights for Search (http://www.google.com/insights/search/#) - With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.
• Pros: Identify phrases by topic/brand/category you want to rank on, Geo‐target where to sell your products, Identify product seasonality, Identify if news stories relate to spikes in searches
• Critiques: No “real” search frequency number only relative comparison
• Cool: Breakout tool identifies phrases rising in search frequencies
• Cost: FREE

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  11) Epiar Negative Keywords Lists (http://www.epiar.com/ppc-negative-keyword-lists/) - Negative keyword targeting is becoming increasingly popular to weed out worthless impressions and clicks in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
• Pros: Save 5% to 40% on PPC spend! And maintain/increase sales, Quick! Set of 14 or 19 online questions, Premium NKL custom keyword research per PPC campaig, Instantly generates list of top 2500 or 5000 negative keywords
• Critiques: Not free
• Cool: Premium NKL prioritized: Top 250 for Yahoo! or Top 65 for MSN
• Cost: One time fee; no subscription

What other tools do you find useful to help you manage your online business?