Would you be interested in find out what keywords Google think are the most relevant to your search query? Would you like results returned to be kept updated all the time? How about being able to access the information for free?

And furthermore what about if I mentioned that you could get all the information using nothing but Firefox (or any other browser) and a regular Google search?

Interested? Read on….

Firstly lets start with the basics and discuss relevance, as this term is at the very core of Googles results returned from your searches.

Google wants to provide the person searching with extremely accurate and relevant results that it can. They are aware that if they are unable to provide this information, it’s likely that users will no longer use their search engine completely, and no users means no ad revenues which is their main source of income!

For a prime example of a search engine dropping the ball, spare a thought for AltaVista? In its time it was the most used search engine, and almost overnight (not quite) lost the crown to Google because they dropped the ball with relevance.

I doubt there is such a thing as search engine loyalty (at least not for the average search engine user). If a better solution arrives, the everyday people will just start using that search engine.

Trust me when I say The Powers To Be At Google are very conscious of this, and put enormous thought and manpower into ensuring that when you search for something, the results returned are highly related to your search term.

Google have to keep the everyday user happy so that they use Google again and again.

Web masters have, of course found methods to “game” Google in the past, so that their own sites come up in place of what should be the most relevant results, and such tricks are still used in modern times.

Mostly these techniques are located by Google who is getting cleverer at finding these types of hacks.

Google seems to get it right a lot of the time, and certainly more than the other major search engines at this point in time.

Ok so given that Google is currently providing the most relevant information and has the largest user base when compared to any other search engine, and that its clear that their primary goal is information relevance to their users, does it not make sense to use Googles search results and be using this information more when conducting keyword research?

For example lets say your searching for the keyword phrase web traffic

When I typed in search term into google, I got back list of current pages that Google tell us are the most relevance to that search term (along with a host of ads).

But in additional to these results at the bottom of the page they also provide (and here is the key)….

Searches RELATED to: increase web traffic (Their words).

Hmm interesting a list of keywords that Google think are relevant to my search.

Google actually display to you the search terms that they believe are the most relevant to your search phrase.

If you do some research about this, there is lots of speculation on how google decide on what words are displayed, but no matter what you think I believe it’s certainly worth investigating further, isn’t it?

In my testing I found the keywords it came up with seemed to be phrases heavily searched on.

In the case of web traffic, the keyword phrases I got back were

increase web traffic free web traffic buy web traffic google web traffic web traffic report web traffic generator web traffic monitoring measure web traffic

They all seem pretty related to my original search.

And you can drill down by clicking on a search term to get relevant keywords to that keyword. For example I could have selected increase web traffic and received a list of related phrases that relate to that term.

This is getting interesting. Before you discount this technique compared to using your favorite keyword tool, It’s my suggestion consider the following.

1) The information from these searches are directly from Google, so the information has not been corrupted in any way.

Many keyword tools don’t use information from Google at all (Wordtracker) or combine data from many sources. Here we have information direct from the source!

2) The information returned from Google is of course very up to date, unlike a lot of other keyword research data that can be months out of date.

I am not saying that you abandon all other keyword tools in favor of this technique, but I do suggest you check it out. With all the latest whiz bang all conquering, overly hyped software tools that seemingly gets released everyday, sometimes it pays to take a step back and go back to just using a very simple method like searching in Google!

In my case, I actually use this method in conjunction with other keyword tools, and get the best out of both worlds. My 2 favorite keyword research tools currently are Nichebot and Market Samurai (google them).

I find the best use of this method is when searching new niches, or when establishing the viability of getting into a particular market.

One final thing to note is that unfortunately not all keywords are supported. Sometimes no related searches come back for a given keyword, but given that it’s free I’m happy to not be too worried about that oversight.

And sometimes I have to mention that the terms returned seem a little bizarre. But this seems to be in more unusual niches that perhaps Google have not collected enough information for (my speculation).

Get out there and take a look at the related search function in Google. The search terms returned might end up being very useful.;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttnMikpK2nc&feature=related]

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