Christian Little

When starting out on your SEO ventures, you need the right tools to get the job done. And unfortunately, SEO is still a very new field of expertise and as such, there is no standardization. With that comes to problem of a huge mix of tools and resources for people to use, some cost money, some are unreliable, some are just stupid, and some actually do a good job – the trick is the find the good ones.

Everybody needs at least one (but most webmasters use several) keyword suggestions tool. Let’s face facts, if you don’t know which keyword to go after, then you might as well not even both building your website. And another fact here – most of the good ones (but not all) cost money (Keyword Discovery, Word Tracker, etc).

And then there’s the free ones that are unreliable (either technically or in the quality of their data). A really good example here is Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool…which died a horrible death. Before it was taken down, it was one of the most popular keyword suggestion tools in the world, but webmasters were hitting it with millions of queries daily and it would constantly crash. Furthermore, the data was only from the Overture database, which isn’t that reliable to start with.

So bring on the keyword suggestion tool by Aaron Wall, creator of SEOBook.com. This guy is one of the few “gurus” out there that I have enormous respect for. I’ve met him in person a few times at SES conferences around the world, and all I can say is that he deserves the amazing reputation that he holds. A lot of the “gurus” out there are all talk, but Aaron actually knows his shit and doesn’t dance around it.

So Aaron released SEO book several years ago, and over time it has become an amazing piece of work on it’s own (if you have the money, I do recommend considering it as it’s one of the only reliable sources of SEO methodology – www.seobook.com).

But some time ago he started releasing some of his own tools to the public, one of which is the amazing keyword suggestion tool that he built.

So what makes this tool so amazing? Well it queries multiple keyword databases, presents the results in a no-BS spreadsheet-like layout, and you can export it to Excel.

The tool also predicts the estimated daily traffic for every keyword that is discovered for the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). It also links you to other keyword tools to backup it’s claims (including Keyword Discovery and Word Tracker, as well as Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool, and Yahoo/Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool).

Best of all, it’s 100% FREE.

Even cooler is that if you scroll down past the results, it will also give you a list of related directories, news websites, and many other links of interest to related sites.

You can play with the tool here: SEOBook.com Keyword Suggestion Tool