The Google Adwords Keyword external tool, long a staple of marketers who needed a tool to determine the popularity and competitiveness of particular keywords for their websites and ad campaigns, has undergone a change. This was threatened long ago by Google, and the tool has been in “beta’ for eons. However, as of last week, that came to an end.

The new Google tool is now live, and there are a few changes that have caused some concern among marketers. (You can read about this change on the Adwords blog). Essentially, the major change has to do with the search number reported in the local and global monthly searches columns. Previously they had included searches from partners as well as searches on Google.com. Now it’s purely from searches on Google. This has resulted in some rather dramatic reductions in search counts for certain keywords in certain markets. However, not everything was drastically affected.

Other aspects that were updated include the ability to more easily filter by match types as well as new capabilities of viewing numbers for mobile search, local search, and more.

A search performed when not signed into your Google Adwords account will only return 100 results. Sign in and get hundreds more.

You may be wondering how this effects the other, non-Google keyword tools. The ones that use Google data will be using old data for a bit, until they can re-tool. The others that pull from other meta search engines, like WordTracker, will not be changed much. You’ll need to ask your tools help desk what the status is.

The bottom line here is that not much has really changed. While the numbers may have been tweaked, in essence, they are more real and should give you a better look at what’s real in a given keyword space.

There is a lot to be said for not reinventing the wheel! Who has time, right? Moreover, unlike Star Trek, I’m not sure I want to go where no man has gone before. I’d much rather trod a well worn path that leads to hungry markets, eager for what I happen to be selling! So how do we arm ourselves for this battle? It often starts with a bit of keyword espionage!

Spying on other site’s keywords is a time-honored tradition in Internet marketing  (relatively speaking , of course!). Up until recently, however, it was an incredibly difficult exercise in frustration and patience, ferreting out the prize keywords your competition was using. That’s no longer the case. There are a number of tools, some free, that make the task a great deal easier, and can help you with the site intelligence you need to target pages and posts on your sites with some sort of plan. Targeting keywords for SEO and marketing campaigns is essential, and if you know which of these are vulnerable, you’re that much further ahead!

Some of the free tools available that can give you a fairly good view of the keywords being targeted by your competition are Alexa, Compete.com, SpyFu, and SEMRush. While each of them in their free versions may not give you a totally accurate picture, you can cobble together a pretty good view by using several of these and comparing data. SpyFu has a very nice paid option. However, accomplishing this for free could work well if you are only working on a limited number of sites/keywords. Otherwise it could tend to get very tedious!

Some of the paid tools that deliver great results are SEO SpyGlass, Market Samurai, and KeywordSpy. All are very good at what  they do, with varying prices and features. Once you have your data, you can make some important decisions about which keywords are worth targeting and which ones might be better left for a more long term view. In any  case, this type of information is invaluable and should be part of your arsenal when trying to unseat those sites above you in the search engines!

This is the fence that stands between most beginning (and more advanced!) Internet marketers and their dreams. You know you need heavily trafficked, low-competition keyword phrases, but are lost about how to find them. While this task does require a bit of work, it can be done, even in competitive markets. Those take a bit more digging, but can be unearthed just the same!

First, you need to understand the realities of your market. If you want to sell diet books and want to rank for the keyword “diet,” please note that at this writing there are more than 134 million competing pages for that term. So let’s get real about what you need to do.

At least, starting out, you need to focus on the “longtail” of search. This means the universe of keyword phrases that may not get nearly as many searches per day as “diet,” but are much less competitive. These are typically 4-6 word phrases, and they also carry the advantage of being infinitely more targeted. A phrase like “type 2 diabetes diet plan” has only 2110 pages optimized for this term, yet gets more than 2900 searches monthly. This is the type of gold you want. (There’s a freebie!) It’s also likely to get people who are looking for exactly that, making them a more viable visitor than someone casually surfing for their next failed diet.

Whether you need keywords for optimizing your site, an article marketing campaign, pay per click campaign, or other purposes, getting them to rise to the surface still takes a bit of detective work. Look at it as laying the foundation for your business. It truly is. Nothing else you do will have as big an impact for your business as your keyword research, so be sure to give it the time and seriousness it deserves!

There are several ways to go about this task. You can use totally free methods which, while more time consuming, can get you the same results. How to do this is detailed in this keyword research PDF.

Or if you want to speed things up a bit, you can use some of the tools that are out there. I’ll summarize a few of them here:

Google Tool – This is the Google Adwords Keyword External tool. Long, unwieldy name, but it’s totally free, easy to use, and returns a good set of search numbers. A good place to start.

MicroNicheFinder – One of the best paid tools out there, this one gives you a terrific amount of data on niche keywords, along with market competition, Adwords prices, search counts, and great digging functions. Highly recommended.

Market Samurai – One of the best Internet marketing tools around, it’s more than a keyword tool, though it functions very well in that. It’s also great for SEO, tracking rankings, spying on competition, and more. They have a free trial.

Traffic Travis – Silly name, great tool. Great for your overall business, as well as keywords. Allows you to track, spy, dig deep for keywords, analyze a particular phrase in the search engines, and more. They have a free version as well as a paid one. Check it out.

CashKeywordsPro – New tool, but it is going to be terrific. A great deal of functionality and caters to affiliate marketing. Does most of what the others do, and they will be adding a great deal more as they go along.

You also have the option of outsourcing the task of keyword research, but understand that it can get expensive, and no one will really know your business or your direction like you will. Still, that is an option.

However you choose to get it done, just make sure you devote some time to this, as it is the difference between success or failure!