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

Interested? Then continue reading....

Firstly lets start with the basics and spend a moment discussing relevance, as this term is at the very core of Googles search engine results.

Google wants to provide the person searching with extremely accurate and relevant results possible. Google are aware that if they do not provide this information, it's likely that searchers will stop using their search engine completely, and no searchers means no ad revenues which is their main source of income!

For a classic example of a search engine losing market share, spare a thought for AltaVista? In its time it was the most popular search engine, and almost overnight (not quite) was displaced from 1st position to Google because they dropped the ball with relevance.

I don't think there is such a thing as search engine loyalty (at least not for the average search engine person). If a better solution arrives, the average people will just start using that search engine.

Trust me when I say Google are very aware of this, and put a heap of thought and manpower into ensuring that when you use Google, the results returned are completely related to your search term.

Google need to keep the average user happy so that they return Google again and again.

Web masters have, of course located methods to "game" Google in previous years, so that their own web pages come up instead of what should be the most relevant results, and such tricks are still used today.

Mostly these black hat techniques are picked up by Google who is getting smarter 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 biggest user base when compared to any other search engine, and that its clear that their primary mission is information relevance to their searchers, does it not make sense to go to their 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 entered that keyword phrase into google, I got a list of current pages that Google believe 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: web traffic (Their words).

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

Google actually display to you the keywords that they deem to be the most relevant to your search phrase.

If you do some research about this, there is some speculation on how google decide on what words are displayed, but no matter what you think I think 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 search terms returned to me 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 keyword to get relevant keywords to that search term. For example I could have clicked increase web traffic and obtained a list of related keywords that relate to that term.

This is getting interesting. Before you pass on this method 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 data has not been corrupted in any way.

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

2) The information that comes back from Google is of course very up to date, unlike a lot of other keyword research information 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 recommend 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 technique is when searching new niches, or when trying to establish the viability of entering a particular market.

One last thing to remember is that unfortunately not all keywords are supported. Sometimes no related search terms are provided for a given keyword, but given that it's free I'm happy to overlook that oversight.

And occasionally I have to mention that the terms returned seem a little weird. 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 that come back might end up being very useful.