Unfortunately, many marketers assume that Google Adwords Keyword Tool is the be all end all of all keyword tools. Have you ever wondered why people pay for premium keyword tools when they can just use Google Adwords Keyword Tool? There is a reason for that. The tool does provide you with some decent information, but it doesn’t give you a complete list. I have also found the stats from WordTracker or Keyword Discovery to be more useful that numbers and stats provided by Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Premium keyword tools may cost you some decent amount of money, but when used in conjunction with Google’s tools, they can help you create a better, more comprehensive keyword list.

Keyword Discovery: one of the most powerful keyword tools on the market. While many prefer using Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery has its own advantages. It comes with a variety of features to help you slice and dice your keyword lists.

WordTracker: has been around for years. It’s used by many SEO and advertising professionals. If you are into digging and digging more, WordTracker is a reliable too to consider.

Wordze: has improved a lot in the past few months. For a long time, Wordze wasn’t considered as a true contender to WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. But now it is one of the best keyword tools on the market. Comes with a ton of features and can help you build great lists fast.

Keyword Country: a must have tool for those of you who are focused on niche marketing. You can use it to find new keywords, spy on other people’s successful campaigns, and even improve your landing page’s conversions.

What’s your favorite keyword tool for online advertising?

Is the long-tail making a come-back? It never went anywhere to get started with. But when you work for a company that has a huge PPC budget, it’s easy to just focus on those general or branded terms and forget long-term keywords. You can be sure that Google does not intend to take from its business away by making the web faster. On the contrary, I am quite confident that the company will find a way to get more out of advertisers and improve its search results at the same time (and if one has to go, then …).

It does seem as if it will be more difficult for small players to dominate the search engines without top quality content. With Google’s focus fully on long-tail keywords, a live search feature would bring a whole new dimension to the whole PPC/SEO game. SEO and PPC have gone hand in hand forever. Google’s new approach means marketers need to pay more attention to their keyword lists and provide content/products/pages that are even more laser targeted.

It is difficult to predict what Google’s plans will mean for marketers over the long run. Marketers could focus more on middle-terms or put an extra effort towards dominating the long-tail of the market. Let’s just say there will be more than one way to optimize those PPC campaigns for maximum conversion.

If you are looking for keyword tools that will help you take your Adsense game to the next level, here are 6 keyword tools you should try:

iSpionage: the ultimate keyword tool for Adwords and Adsense professionals. All you need is a keyword or website to get started with your research with this tool. iSpionage shows you SEO/PPC competitors, their ad information, and even related keywords.

Keyword Spy: the best keyword research tool around for affiliate marketers and Adsense professionals. It has something for everyone. It’s not cheap by any means, but whether you are an affiliate, a PPC professional, or an Adsense expert, this tool comes in handy.

Keyword Country: another kill tool for niche marketers. Lets you analyze your niche, competition, and keywords more effectively. It’s used by both Adwords and Adsense experts. Great way to put the right foot forward in a new niche.

SpyFu: the best tool to get some spying done on your competitors and find new good keywords to target. Comes with a set of tools that enable you to find out more about what other people are doing.

Compete: Compete is perhaps the pound for pound best research tool on the market. It can tell you how long people have spent on your website, and what keywords have brought you the type of traffic you are looking for.

Market Samurai: a desktop application that lets you find content, analyze your SEO competition, find new niches to tackle and more on your PC or Mac.

What’s your favorite Adsense tool?

The updated Keyword Tool has a number of benefits over the older tools:

Flexible search options: Search by any combination of keyword, website/URL, and category (where available) and receive a single set of results

Easy keyword refinement: Filter results by word or keyword match type

Advanced options: View statistics for mobile search and use data filters based on local searches, search and ad share, and more

While there may be plenty of powerful paid research tools that are worth picking up, Google Keyword Tool is good enough at this point to address a lot of marketers’ needs.

So what’s new in this tool? Google Keyword Tool can now show you whether you have a certain keyword in your list. It can also be used to add negative keywords to a list quickly. You are probably going to still need tools such as WordTracker, but Google Keyword Tool is not too shabby.

People have argued for and against this approach in the past. There is nothing with Toshiba bidding on Apple branded terms and trademarks. Besides, having the ability to challenge top companies in a niche from the get go is good for businesses (and for Google’s bottom-line too).

There are going to be complaints about Google’s new approach in Europe. Those folks do seem to be a bit more strict about these things. But Google is not too concerned:

the European Court of Justice has upheld our right to allow advertisers to bid for keywords corresponding to third party trademarks. This change allows us to harmonize our policies across the world. Users will benefit by seeing more relevant ads following a search on Google.

UK Adwords advertisers will be able to use branded terms in the copy of their ads too. If you can afford it, it’s only fair.

You can use this tool to dig up information on your competitors based on a specific domain name or a keyword. If you are getting into a whole new market, this tool can help you get a head-start. It breaks down the information across multiple search engines, so you get some real actionable information from this tool.

iSpionage can not only show you who’s competing for those top spots in your niche, it can give you all kinds of details about their campaigns. If you enter a domain URL into this tool, it is going to show you an estimate budget, click information, and all kinds of other information about your competitors’ campaigns.

These days, it never hurts to use new tools to dig up keyword and campaign information. iSpionage is one of those premium tools that are worth pay for. But at the end of the day, it’s just a tool.

Searchenginewatch.com

The transition from one network to another is not going to be that straight forward. There are some differences that can render some of your campaigns inactive. The difference between title lengths, geo-targeting, and account limits can be a bit problematic.

Those of you who are using Yahoo! and want to save yourself some headache are probably better off making the switch to AdCenter and start putting some time towards turning your account into what you want it to be. There are things you can do to optimize your campaigns for this upcoming move. It never hurts to invest some time in it.

Apparently, there is a very good explanation to what seems to have happened (courtesy of Search Engine Land):

I can confirm that some Google support pages were inadvertently showing different content to the Google crawler than to users. This error has since been fixed. We will investigate how this happened and make sure that we take appropriate action.

So did Google hire a black-hat SEO or was this just an honest mistake? Those who have seen all the spammers doing all kinds of things on Adwords and getting away with them won’t be surprised by this.

According to WordTracker, Strategizer works with your Google Analytics data to help you come up with the best keyword strategy possible for your business. It can show you what keywords to go after and which ones to spend most of your efforts on. Knowing what keywords give you the best chance to grab more market share and increase your conversions can be very helpful for businesses.

Strategizer is not going to be cheap by any means, but it can provide you with actionable data to optimize your campaigns and get the most out of your keywords. If you want to find new markets to target or expand your market-share in your current markets, Strategizer could be a valuable tool to take advantage of.

So how does the webmasters behind this crazy offer explain their deal? They do talk about the license of these themes and the fact that they can redistribute it.

Now I am not suggesting that these guys are doing anything wrong. The GPL license document clearly indicates that these guys have the right to modify and redistribute those themes. While WooThemes is not clear on the whole thing, it does tout its move to GPL clearly.

All the confusion does not reflect well on all the parties involved. Let’s face it. Not supporting premium theme developers is not exactly the right thing to do. It’s not illegal though. More transparency is probably required as far as all parties are concerned. As far as earning money on someone else’s work, that’s a whole other story.