Once you know best keywords, next step is to see what your competitors are currently doing with them. If your sites of your competitors rank higher than yours, or offer more enticement for customer to visit, then it is more likely that they will be attracting customers and not you.

The results were...

keyword - 93 searches (lower case, singular) Keyword - 39 searches (Capitalized, singular) keywords - 187 searches (lower case, plural) Keywords - 184 searches (Capitalized, plural) KEYWORD - 115 searches (UPPER case, singular) Total Predicted Daily Searches for all Engines = 618

This figure - 618 - Wordtracker compiled directly from results taken from Meta-engines, Metacrawler and Dogpile in order to eliminate artificial skew.

Wordtracker further adjusted number downward by filtering out keyword spam (as defined above) based upon a proprietary formula used to identify search terms that are being searched at intervals too regular to have been conducted by actual humans.

These suspiciously regular and assumed to be artificially generated searches are therefore discounted in arriving at final number - 618.

Even when taking into account such dependent variables such as position, title, and description, we would expect (logically guesstimate) website to receive about 10% of total traffic due to top-ten placement, targeted title and relevant link-description.

And finally, we should expect no better than 25% of that total traffic, due to fact that Wordtracker has top-ten placement in only 25% of relevant engines.

So calculations show...

618 x 10% = 61.8 x 25% = approx 15 visits per day.

This is more in line with Wordtracker's actual 10-15 per day average number of visits generated by 5 variations of search term keyword across all of major engines.

So, whose numbers should we trust?

When it comes to trusting numbers, you should take into account what you are using them for. If you're looking to determine relative popularity of a given item, service, topic, or category, then Overture's STST can fill bill nicely - and for free!

For instance, Overture's STST returns following numbers for following searches...

58,312 home insurance 57,315 home owner insurance 233,854 auto insurance 570,337 car insurance

This tells us (for free) that car insurance gets about twice as many searches as auto insurance. It also tells us that home insurance gets about same number of searches as home owner insurance ...and that searches for car insurance is TEN times more popular than home owner insurance.

No doubt about it, when researching what to sell online, this is valuable preliminary information that Overture's STST provides for free.

However, based upon what we now know about artificial skew, we'd want to get a third-party-review of search terms - one that adjusted numbers for skew - before we bought advertising on a pay-per-click engine or spent good time and money optimizing a site for organic (think Google) Web search results.

After all, if Overture shows 6,016 "hits" per day out of which Wordtracker is experiencing 15 visitors, then reality suggests we should do math (i.e., apply information) that distills raw numbers into useful data. Let's first decide if "15" visitors per day will pay advertising bill (duh!) ...and, if reality count is anywhere near 6,016, we'll be ecstatic, right?

Always remember it's amateurs that believe optimistically romanced numbers just before they lose their wallets on way to bankruptcy. Professional marketers learn to err on downside of expectations and then smile when pleasant surprises shower down riches.

They know that nothing beats accurate information - most powerful marketing tool on earth.