Using various tools can help you find more keywords to target. You can often find some great little gems that you wouldn’t usually think of that really are worth adding to your campaign. But with so many out there that all claim to have the most accurate information it’s difficult to finally settle on a list of keywords to use for your SEO campaign. So how can you be sure you’re targeting the right keywords?

You can always go for the obvious Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find your keywords. This is a free resource from Google and can help you find some good keywords to target, along with how many times each keyword is searched for and in which regions of the world. This tool isn’t so good for digging out those long-tail keywords but can give you a good idea on what people are searching for, in what volume and also offers related suggestions that you may want to consider.

Some go for Wordtracker, a paid keyword research tool that utilises search query results collected from Dogpile. This is a great tool for picking out those long-tail keywords and can help you find those gems that can bring in the real high quality traffic, although tends to be a little out of date as their database is only updated every 160 days.

Others look at what their competition is doing and base their list of keywords on what they are targeting – again, an effective way of generating an initial list of keyword terms to base your research on.

You get the idea – there are various other keyword research tools that are widely used. Some are free and some are paid services. But, with the explosion of social media there are plenty of tools that don’t initialy spring to mind when it comes to starting your keyword research…

How about Twitter? Not only can you use tools to find what people are talking about and how they phrase their references to a particular product, service or idea it can give you great ideas on hot topics to write about that relate to your industry that are likely to be Stumbled, Dugg, Retweeted and so on.

How about Facebook Lexicon? It lets you check terms that are being used across people’s walls and follows the trending of them, in a similar way to Google Trends (http://www.google.co.uk/trends).

There are many more tools that you could use for your keyword research that I haven’t mentioned – some that maybe do deserve the mention, others not so much. What tools do you use for your keyword research and have they been successful – or even accurate? Which do you find most helpful?

Here are the new defaults:

Arial: 728×90, 336×280, 120×600, 120×240

Verdana: 300×250, 160×600, 468×60, 250×250, 234×60, 125×125, 180×150

Times New Roman: 200×200

These new font selections appear to have been rolled out across most (if not all) content sites now.

A short WebmasterWorld thread has a post from a member that knows his stuff. The advertiser said:

“But I’ve noticed something interesting. The Mouseover Rate is 10X or even 20X my CTR. So, folks are mousing over my ads like crazy, but of course getting no action.”

It is interesting to know that people are hovering their mouse over the ads, at least. But another user comments:

“I commonly see ads on the right hand side of the page next to where the scroll bar is located. If a user moves their mouse across your ad to get to the scrollbar, then that is counted as a mouseover.”

So, is it down to the ad location or are these results genuine?

You can see the full forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and if you have any feedback on your experience with Google Display Ads feel free to share your views below.

It comes as no surprise that Bing is advertising on Google AdWords to bring in some extra traffic. Although it did surprise us to hear that Google sees value in Bing’s paid listings program and can be seen advertising in the adCenter to promote their AdWords service.

Maybe this is Google’s way of showing they can afford to make in-your-face gestures by advertising on a direct competitors site, albeit on a small scale. Or maybe it’s a sign that it really is worth looking into Bing PPC. It could be something that will really pay off for you and give you that boost ahead of the competition.

According to Microsoft ads placed in the Microsoft adCenter appear both in the Bing search engine as well as MSN.

Have you used the adCenter? If so, what are your thoughts? Are the conversion rates any better? Are they less expensive? What is your experience with them compared to Google AdWords?