Keyword research is the most inexact element of Search Marketing. The lack of any one clear source of accurate keyword data is perhaps the biggest problem any search marketer will face.

Overture, the free keyword tool from Yahoo!, is either dead or dying

Most people will be familiar with Overture’s keyword tool which has been returning free keyword estimates for many years. Now the old adage the you get what you pay for still holds true, and most professionals have long since moved to paid services.

But apparently the Overture tool isn’t too well cared for by its owners, as Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal finds out from John Slade, Global Product Management with Yahoo Search Marketing:

First, I’d like to clarify that Yahoo! Search Marketing’s public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today… the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the sheer volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear…

The same Yahoo! representative is then quoted as saying:

… the public tool continues to be available but my advice to our advertisers is to use the protected keyword research tool.

which bascially confirms something we all knew a long time ago – the Overture keyword tool pretty much sucks.

One man’s risk is another man’s opportunity

And lo and behold, hot on the tracks of the rumours about the demise of Overture’s tool comes an announcement via Aaron Wall that Wordtracker has introduced a new free version of Wordtracker that returns up yo 100 keywords.

The Wordtracker tool can be found at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.

Want a little bit more?

I use a number of keyword tools, both free and paid. To be honest there’s no fail safe method to generate 100% accurate keyword lists, but by using a combination of tools you can come up with pretty decent ones.

As I wrote previously, I’m using NicheBot (that’s an affiliate link) which has some great features for generating and processing keyword lists. Recently I’ve also added another professional tool to the armoury which I’m really liking a lot (I’ll post about that later).

If anyone knows of other tools that fly a little below the radar I’d love to hear about them.

[UPDATE - Now Trillian is offering a free keyword tool - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html]