Disovering keyword popularity

[yisraelharris]

In order to know which keywords to optimize for on the search engines, it is extremely important for me to know how often actual potential clients are entering the keywords I'm thinking of optimizing for. How do I discover that?

I tried word trac ker dotcom, but its results were unsatisfactory to me. I felt that its results seemed somewhat skewed, and did not give a true picture of what is going on out there.

So can someone suggest other keyword popularity tools or ways of figuring out which are the keywords I should be optimizing for? (Someone told me about Overture keyword selector tool.) I would appreciate hearing not only which tools are out there, but how reliable or useful you have found them.

Thank you so much.

[keno]

One way to do it might be to advertise on Adwords.

Choose as many combination of keywords that you can possibly find. Use excel the manipulate and concatenate new words.

Plug a few hundred into Adwords using phrase matching to keep costs down.

Then see how many impressions each one got. Unless you are on page one it's not an exact science, but you do get an idea for the normal distribution of the ones you are analyzing.

I'm kind of a noob at this too, but that may be one way to do it. BTW if nobody clicks you don't pay anything.

I use the tools mentioned above also, but use results as a relative indicator rather than absolute data.

[yisraelharris]

Excellent idea. Thank you.

Any others out there?