For years Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool has been the most recommended site to use when seeking related key words and key phrases for search engine optimization. Other paid services have come along including Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, and Wordze.

In the very beginning I did some dumb things. One of them was taking the Overture data at face value. Although its possible to make money building a straight-forward content site with articles based off of 100 results Overture returns, its damn inefficient.

Overture itself is very easily manipulated. Once I built a website from a keyword with blatently overly inflated results (think 1,000,000+) today Overture shows only 25,000 searches a month.

How about the other tools like Wordtracker? These guys don’t have Google or Yahoo’s data. Instead, they have a small sampling of searches from a meta-search engine or somewhere else. The tool then has to guess how many real searches are made a day. To top it all off, I suspect the data skews hard toward certain demographics while missing other groups completely. (Who do you know that doesn’t use Google, Yahoo, or MSN?)

If you plan on dumping a lot of time and resources into a website based off of overture data, forget it. You want real data? Run a PPC campaign on Google. Yes, if the niche is competitive it could cost you an arm or two. The fact is, unless AOL has another leakage, this is as good as it gets. You will see a real number every day for the actual searches for your keyphrase.

Keyword tools are not worthless. However, what it does mean is you should use them for keyword discovery, not for figuring out what the best keywords to focus on are. A few bloggers prematurely announced the death of the Overture tool giving alternatives free publicity. Right now I am also using Wordze.com. Its only $35 a month, which is really quite a deal considering I’ve found it more useful than the more expensive Wordtracker (which is currently $54 on a monthly basis.)

Here are a few implementation suggestions about mining for search data with PPC. First, turn off the content network. You don’t care about it right now, although it can give you a good indication how saturdated the niche will be for Adsense. Second, use exact match by putting key phrases in brackets [like this.] If you choose to use broad match (just the key phrases by themselves) then log all of your search data. Broad search data will give you an inside peak of what related keywords and phrases Google may be using for their latent semantic indexing.

So, is this expansive? You bet, expect to spend at least a couple hundred dollars for a single test, perhaps even thousands. Hmm, makes $250 for a years subscription to Wordtracker sound dirt cheap. If you want to build more effective sites you need real data; that data is not free.