Best Free Keyword Generation Tool (and a Market Samurai Review)
Wow, now that’s one long ass title, but quite fitting nonetheless. I always see people talking about what the best keyword tool is, and you’ll always get the typical responses: the sheep who just spout out what they already heard elsewhere without using anything themselves; the affiliates of one product vs. another product trying to either make a quick buck or justify their promos for the tool; and the drowned out voices of those who are giving an honest opinion.
Since Keyword Elite and Micro Niche Finder turned down my offer of saying their tools are the best keyword tools in exchange for a measly $2,000,000, I’m going to take the route of giving you my honest opinion. 
Now, having said that, I already see some people assuming that I’m against Keyword Elite 2 and Micro Niche Finder — that’s completely not the case. Both are pretty cool tools, but I’m going to focus on the free keyword tools for now as many draw from the same sources …. it’s just in how they display the results and what features they have that make all the difference.
So now, back to my honest review.
There are two main free keyword generation tools out there:
and
Having said that, Market Samurai essentially pulls its results from Google’s keyword generator anyway, and Google won’t try to sell you other stuff.
Google’s keyword tool is pretty nifty, and if you enter in a few relevant keywords, especially more long tail keywords, you can get some very relevant results that will show you how many searches they get a month, how competitive it is to advertise there, etc..
I love this tool and use it all the time, especially because it’s web-based and very easy to access.
The only major downside to it is that they don’t really allow you to sort the results easily. It’s still easy to see mostly what keywords are good and what ones are bad, but it’d be nice to offer more filtering features.
That’s where Market Samurai comes into play. The interface I don’t like nearly as much as Google’s own keyword tool, but they do a nice job of allowing you to sort through the results, rank the results by order of traffic or competition level, etc..
Since the keyword tool on Market Samurai is free anyway, I say use it if you’re going through HUGE keyword lists. They have some nifty filtering features that make it worthwhile.
However, since it’s desktop based, if you’re looking for a quick search and aren’t wanting to sift through hundreds of results, Google’s own keyword tool is just fine and easier.
Now, having said that, here’s my personal tip for finding awesome keywords: focus on keywords that get AT LEAST 1,000 searches per month and have at least a little Adwords competition (meaning that at least someone finds value in that keyword). Then see if domain names that are .com, .net, or .org are available with the keyword phrase in them (like [keyword phrase].com). If they are available, grab one (ideally .com, then .net, and then .org in order of preference).
Then make the keyword phrase your page title (what appears at the very top of the browser on any webpage), and you should have a decent chance of getting ranked well doing just that. Your chances will go up even more if most of the search results in Google don’t have the keyword phrase in their page title — to find out, do a search with the phrase in quotes on Google and check out how many sites have the keyword phrase within the page title (the blue link). If not many do, you have an awesome keyword to go after.
Comments / opinions — please leave them below.
My next two reviews will deal with traffic and leads, and both of those will have some awesome tips to get rich online … or at least make a little extra dough….
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