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You’re probably using anywhere from 2 to 6 keyword research tools in your work. If not, you must be a pretty reasonable person who isn’t drawn in by sales hype and shmarmy promotional pages. I admit I’ve used more keyword research tools than I can count. None of them really help you find good keywords. You have to find the good keywords in the lists of suggestions your tools give you, and those lists are only as good as your intuitive grasp of the vertical you’re trying to optimize for.

But don’t fret, friends. Honest Mike’s Used SEO Tools has just the right resource for you and it will only cost you the time it takes to read this article to get your greedy little fingers on it — I mean, I’m going to show you how to improve your keyword research for free.

Take a keyword research tool — any keyword research tool. Use that tool to develop a list of keywords for which your tried-and-true methods give you strong indications of value. Now go and create content for those keywords. Build the pages! Build the links! Then come back here when your pages are indexed and receiving traffic.

Three Months Later After Doing “Standard” Keyword Research

Now that your newly minted pages are generating search referrals, do you still have the original keyword list you used to build those pages? I hope so, because you’re going to need it.

Now, sit down with your favorite spreadsheet tool and put the following data into these columns:

1. The list of keyword expressions you decided to optimize for
2. The corresponding page URLs
3. The corresponding page titles
4. The normalized count of search referral strings from your raw server logs that match your keyword
5. Your page’s average rank for the targeted keyword in Ask
6. Your page’s average rank for the targeted keyword in Bing
7. Your page’s average rank for the targeted keyword in Google
8. Your page’s average rank for the targeted keyword in Yahoo!

If you do this right you’ll probably notice several things, including (but definitely not limited to):

• You have no search visibility for some of your keywords in Ask, Bing, or Yahoo!
• You’re not getting nearly as much traffic as you have been led to expect from that AOL click data
• You get traffic from a lot of expressions you did not target
• You’re probably not targeting all the right expressions

If you get as much traffic from a number 1 listing as from a number 9 listing, what does that tell you about your choice of keywords?

If you’re not getting traffic from Ask, Bing, and Yahoo! and you have the same rankings on those search engines as on Google you’re justified in saying that there is no point in optimizing for those search engines. If your rankings are different, shut up and start optimizing for those search engines because you’re in no position to complain about not getting enough search traffic.

If you’re getting traffic from fewer untargeted expressions than targeted expressions you probably have too little page copy.

If you’re getting more traffic from targeted expressions than untargeted expressions you probably rely too much on anchor text.

If you’re getting more traffic for your “money” terms than the rest of your site, you probably have a really sucky Website.

If you’re getting more traffic from search than from other Websites, you really, truly, most sincerely suck at this. Find another business.

Or learn how to expand your opportunities for traffic. Search engine optimization should be just the beginning, not the end of your Web marketing. Through search you create visibility and draw in interested people whose interests escape your initial keyword research. If you create good content some of those people will link to your site. No matter how many links you buy, exchange, or steal — if your site isn’t good enough to attract at least SOME natural links you should still be able to improve it so that it gets those natural links.

Website referrals should provide you with more traffic than any search engine. When you don’t care about which search engine sends you the most traffic, you improve your search engine optimization 100-fold.

You should see that each search engine’s users have a slightly (or greatly) different set of terms they use to find your content. If you cannot see that kind of variation in your search referral data you have totally screwed up your search optimization. You need to fix it.

You cannot use one search engine to optimize for another. If you think you can, you have absolutely no clue as to what you are doing. Get out of SEO before you hurt yourself or swallow your foolish pride and learn how to do it right.

Your keywords won’t lie to you. They’ll tell you what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. They’ll tell you what needs to be fixed. They’ll tell you what is working. But you have to know where to look for them. Every keyword has a “before” and “after” picture. Make sure you look at both pictures before deciding you’ve done your keyword research because it ain’t over until you’ve exhausted every possible way of obtaining traffic for a specific keyword from search.