How To Find Good Keywords

How To Find Good Keywords

by: Trenton Moss

Good keywords are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being targeted by many other websites (low competition). There are a number of tools out there that can help you find them.

Wordtracker

The best tool out there, Wordtracker is one of the most essential SEO tools. To use Wordtracker:

Go to the Wordtracker website (http://www.wordtracker.com)and pay $7 for 24 hours’ access

Enter a keyword phrase you’re thinking about targeting

Wordtracker will suggest hundreds of related phrases click on the ones you like

Once youกve clicked on all the phrases you like, run them through the program

Wordtracker will compile a score for each phrase, based on the number of users searching for it and the number of websites targeting it

The higher the score, the better the keyword phrase!

Wordtracker also offers a free service which works in the same way but only uses results generated from MSN.

Overture

Also useful, Overtureกs search term suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/), is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works in much the same way as Wordtracker but doesn’t tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase.

Google

Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox) tell you which keyword phrases are being targeted by other websites.

Guidebeam

Guidebeam (http://www.guidebeam.com) is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers provided for each phrase are Guidebeamกs estimation of how relevant that phrase is.

About The Author

This article was written by Trenton Moss. Heกs crazy about web usability and accessibility so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy (Webcredible http://www.webcredible.co.uk) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.

This article was posted on September 01, 2004

by Trenton Moss

Pizzazz Prevents Piracy of your Articles

Pizzazz Prevents Piracy of your Articles

by: Darby Higgs

Writing articles for the web is an effective way to bring more traffic to your site. You write the article, you include a link in the authorกs info box, you submit it to article distributors and it gets reproduced with a link back to your site. You get traffic from the link as well some kudos from the search engines which will eventually build even more traffic. Bonza!

But what happens if someone just grabs your article and reuses it without the link? You get nothing for your effort in writing the article!

Before you can do anything about it you need to know how to find the culprits. Enter stage left our friends at Google. Google has a wonderful service called Google alerts which will send you an email if and when a page containing a keyword or keyword phrase is found by its busy little spiders.

Access Google Alerts by going to www.google.com/alerts Then you can enter your keyword phrase inside double quotes, select Web for Search Type and decide on a frequency of report. You can come back to change any of these details later, experience will guide you to the best settings for your situation. Easypeasy. Every time the spiders find your phrase you will get an email telling you where it was found.

The alerts will tell you how successful your distribution method has been and it will also tell you if people are reproducing your articles without including the link. Then you can do something about it.

What has this got to do with pizzazz? Distinctive keyword phrases are needed to make this monitoring work. If you use a phrase like web promotion or like traffic building you will get lots of false positives, webpages with the phrase but not your article.

So you need to spice up your articles with some unusual words in unusual combinations in other words pizzazz. Use two or three word phrases, just ignore any punctuation, Google will treat it as spaces. Don’t forget to put your key phrase into double quotes. Google will then find just your page or copies of it and you can easily check that everyone is playing cricket. Pirates will be quickly detected.

For this item I could use any of these as my keyword phrase false positive webpages, pizzazz distinctive, traffic bonza, cricket pirates All in double quotes). None are likely to appear elsewhere on the web, but if they do Google Alerts will pick them up, and I can edit the alert to ensure only this article is reported.

Writing articles with pizzazz (use a thesaurus) is more fun, and your articles will stay in the mind of your readers mind a little longer.

About The Author

Darby Higgs is editor of OzArticles at http://wwww.ozarticles.com a clearing house of articles with Australian content.

darby @ozarticles.com

This article was posted on March 27

by Darby Higgs

Is your Website Doomed for Failure Before youกve B

Is your Website Doomed for Failure Before youกve Built it?

by: Suzanne Morrison

One of the things that many people overlook when building a new website is keywords. I have to admit, I did exactly the same thing myself when I started out. You can build the flashiest, most professional looking website, with lots of great content, but if you don’t think about keywords first your website is most likely to be doomed for failure at least as far as search engines are concerned.

Visitors from search engines are the most targeted types of visitor that you could hope for. What you need to do is find out which keywords these people are using when they search in Google, Yahoo or MSN and ensure that your web page(s) are optimized for these keywords.

When researching your keywords you need to make sure that you

1. Choose keywords that people are actually searching for. Don’t optimize your site for keywords that people rarely search on.

2. Choose keywords that are not too highly competitive unless you’re an SEO whiz that is

If you keep these two goals in mind when choosing keywords you will have the best chance possible of rising to the lofty heights of the search engine results pages.

So, whatกs the best way to do keyword research? Iกve tried many different tools, but my favorite by is Wordtracker. You can sign up for a free trial of Wordtracker at http://www.homebizdirect.com/wordtracker.html but if you’re serious about your keyword research consider using the full version as it allows you to select unlimited keywords and includes results from 8 different search engines, 3 different directories and 4 different pay per click engines, compared to 1 search engine and 30 keywords in the trial version.

Once you’re logged into Wordtracker I recommend using the กKeyword Universeก to brainstorm for keywords. You just need to type in any keywords related to your area of interest and then use the built in thesaurus to find related keywords and synonyms. For example if I enter the keywords กinternet marketingก Wordtracker returns 300 related keywords including กweb site marketingก, กpromotionก and กonline marketingก.

Wordtracker then allows me to view a list of all the keyword searches that have included my keyword phrase. If I click on กweb site marketingก Wordtracker returns 118 rows of keywords that include that phrase, for example กweb site marketingก, กweb site marketing strategyก, กweb site online marketingก and more.

If I like the look of these keywords I can just add them to my basket and continue choosing keywords until I have 100s of keywords. For this example Iกll just add the 118 results to my basket and continue on to Wordtracker’s กCompetition Analysisก.

At the competition analysis phase I have a number of search engines, directories and pay per click engines to choose from. I can choose a maximum of two search engines, but for speed I normally tend to just go for Google, since it represents 35% of all searches. I can always go back later and look at other search engines if I have a good set of keywords.

Now the interesting part begins…

Wordtracker returns me a table with the first 100 keywords from my earlier keyword selection. The keywords are displayed in order of กKEIก, which means กKeyword Effectiveness Indexก. This is a measure to allow you to quickly identify which keywords are likely to give you the best results. Keywords with high KEIs are the best targets as these represent keywords with a combination of a high number of searches and a low amount of competing websites.

Other important statistics provided by Wordtracker are:

24 Hours – The predicted amount of traffic for a single day, for this search engine only (Google in this case)

Competing The number of competing websites for this keyword phrase.

Hereกs an example of two of the results returned from my กmarketing web siteก search:

Example 1

กmarketing web site designก

KEI 54.256

Count 46

24Hrs 17

Competing 39

Example 2

กweb site marketingก

KEI 0.256

Count 505

24Hrs 171

Competing 998000

You can see from these examples that the most popular keyword phrase here is กweb site marketingก, with approximately 171 searches in Google every 24 hours. However, this keyword phrase has almost a million competing websites, so if you decided to target this you would have a long hard slog to get on the first page of the search results.

In this example, my preference would be to choose the กMarketing web site designก phrase. Although there are 10 times less searches on Google per day for this keyword phrase, there are only 39 competing websites. So the chances are that I can get onto the first page of search results very quickly. I could also combine this keyword phrase with a few others from my research to build up the number of visitors to my site.

Once you have finished researching and have a good keyword list, ensure that add your keywords to

the page title

the h1 and h2 tags

the image alt tags

the keyword meta tags

the copy itself

Also make sure that you include the keywords in the anchor text when you are linking to your site from another site.

Going through this exercise of choosing keywords each time you set up a new website or create a new webpage will ensure that you have the best chance of getting targeted search engine visitors.

About The Author

Suzanne Morrison is the webmaster of http://www.homebizdirect.com. Visit her site to learn about more ways to promote your website.

This article was posted on August 27

by Suzanne Morrison

Making Informed Keyword Choices

Making Informed Keyword Choices

by: John Calder

Marketers stake much of their livelihood on keywords, whether for proper search engine optimization or targeted payperclick advertising. One challenge faced by inexperienced marketers involves knowing which phrases to target out of hundreds of combinations.

Often, one will find terms which look good, but later testing reveals the terms simply don’t convert visitors to sales. If you performed your due diligence by testing and tracking all elements of the sales page (copy, graphics, price, etc), this scenario may leave you baffled and wondering ขWhy didn’t this phrase produce sales? It really looked like a winner!ข

Every search term presents us with the challenge of reading intent. What was the visitor really looking for when they typed in the phrase? While it’s impossible to know this with certainty, you can improve your ability to read intent from keywords, and improve the accuracy of your targeting.

The First Guideline: Pay Attention to Qualifying Terms

Are multiterm (3 or more keyword) search phrases more targeted? Not always. A narrow search indicates only that searcher intends to find a specific piece of information. It does not necessarily indicate intent to purchase.

For example, the search phrase ขbig blue widgetข points to a narrowly defined interest, but does not reveal whether the searcher intends to research prices, look at photographs of big, blue widgets, or merely discovered a passing curiosity after hearing about them someplace else. The phrase appears promising at first, but still presents us with a high likelihood of nonconverting traffic. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t test such a phrase, only that you are more likely to see a good deal of untargeted spillover traffic.

What you really want to look for during your keyword research is qualification. Specificity is not enough. So, how do you spot the qualifying terms that indicate the searcher is in buying mode?

You spot them by applying a formula to your keyword list. If you have your list in front of you now, take a look at it and see if you can apply the following parameters to any of the phrases:

Contextual/Situational

Urgent

Preferential

Relevant terms for contextual/situational searching might include:

Bad credit/good credit

Student

Divorced

Retired

Self Employed

When you apply contextual/situational parameters to your keywords, you should think in terms of ขfilling in the blanksข of the situation: ขIf I have bad credit, where can I get a loan?ข ขWhile I’m a student, what deals can I get on travel?ข

Searches qualified in this way indicate an active interest in finding solutions. Visitors generated from these terms may view themselves as still in ขresearch modeข, but the fact is that they are as ripe as they’ll ever be for a convincing sales pitch.

What about urgency? The most obvious terms to look for include: fast, quick, speedy, immediate, and so on. However, you may also find terms which imply urgency, such as : easy (the easier it is, the faster it is), hasslefree, preapproved, automatic and instant, to name a few.

Lastly, preference can reveal much about where the visitor is in the buying process. Qualifying terms pertaining to the sales process, to delivery (e.g., ขinstant downloadข or ขfree shippingข) and customer service all indicate a proactive search for solutions.

The Second Guideline: Know Your Industry

Inexperienced marketers often miss out on keyword goldmines because they make the mistake of focusing only on the data their keyword tools give them for broad terms. The tools and tactics one picks up in his or her marketing education are valuable, but they’re no substitute for intimate knowledge of the market. When you ขdabbleข in an industry you often choose only the most obvious keywords, and this leaves you in competition with all the other dabblers scrounging for top placement on those terms.

A much better option (especially if your field is affiliate marketing) is to educate yourself deeply on the vocabulary of one market at a time. Learn everything you can about this one market, its sub or spinoff markets, and anything else that helps you live and breathe the mindset of your potential customer.

When you do this, you will find a wealth of new keywords – words with which only an ขinsiderข would be familiar. These terms are not only more targeted, but they invoke a measure of instant credibility as well. The customer knows you couldn’t reach him if you did not ขspeak his language’.

The Third Guideline: Choose Terms Which Hold Synergy with Your Sales Copy

In the fight to squeeze out as much traffic as possible, it is tempting to bid on as many keywords as possible and funnel them all to one or two sales pages. A better tactic is to slice down your keyword list into subsets which closely match the tone evoked by your sales copy. Next, separate out the terms which you feel are viable but ขdon’t quite fitข, and create new sales copy to support them.

Why do all of this extra work? Well, there’s a little secret you should know about. It comes from a surprising place: the world of personal ads. Personal ads provide the ultimate study in ขshort copyข. Have you ever placed an ad on a dating site and found that most of your respondents focused on only one or two words in your profile and then wrote to you despite their obvious incompatibility?

People are often lazy and they are often hurried. Your customer’s eyes zero in on only a few words – those most important to him at that very moment, and the rest of your copy gets filtered away.

This is why it’s crucial that your keywords hold synergy with your sales copy – and by synergy I mean that if you intend your prospect to zero in on, for example, ขeasy web site creationข, then your copy should speak only to ease, speed and instantaneous gratification of your product, and not make mention of any additional, complicated features. Save those features for your copy when you target people on terms like ขadvanced web site creationข. Even if your solution offers both ease of use and advanced results, split them off.

Making informed keyword choices boosts your bottom line. Remember that quality always trumps quantity. Even though you can’t read your customers mind, the guidelines presented here will get you one step closer to dissecting it!

Copyright 2004 John Calder

About The Author

John Calder is the owner/editor of The Ezine Dot Net. Visit today and read more of his articles held online at: http://www.TheEzine.Net. RSS feeds are available

This article was posted on September 06, 2004

by John Calder

Understanding Google AdWords

Understanding Google AdWords

by: S. Housley

Google AdWords

Unlike many search engines Google, to its credit, clearly denotes search listings that are paid placement. In fact, Google AdWords appear in a separate section down the left side of the screen.

Google AdWords provide an inexpensive advertising venue for businesses to advertise products or services to a targeted audience. Advertisers have the ability to control their budget, target their advertising based on keywords. Advertisers are also free to determine the ad contents.

Google AdWords allow for nearly instant traffic, which can be turned on and off. Traffic results can be measured, providing information on what is successful, what isn’t and what needs to be changed. AdWords can be found that work by running a test campaign.

Benefits to AdWords

Advertisers bid on keywords, the more an advertiser is willing to pay the higher the likelihood the ad will appear higher in position in the list of ads served. Google, invariably wanting to make the most from advertisers, determines placement based on a combination of click through rate, bid amount and budget. Of course, in order to maximize revenue and please searchers Google does have guidelines for ads served and all ads must receive a minimum percentage click through or they are removed.

AdWord Guidelines

Clearly and accurately describe the website, this is to the advertiser and searchers benefit. Ultimately, the more qualified the visitor who clicks the ad, the higher the likelihood the clicker will convert into a sale. By providing clear and accurate information, searchers who click the ad are qualified leads, which tend to convert more consistently than unqualified leads. The most effective advertising communicates a clear message to a targeted audience.

Avoid excessive capitalization, superlatives and lavish exclamation marks in the ad. By doing this you are not only serving the visitor you are filtering unwanted clicks from nonbuyers. Due to space limitations your ad message will need to be concise. Select keywords that are relevant to your product, service or content. Call to action phrases are not allowed (i.e. you cannot use phrases like กclick hereก in your ad copy.) There are also no popups.

Steps for AdWord Campaign

1.) Open an account

2.) Target language and country This is very important because if your product or service can not be exported you do not want to pay to advertise in those countries for which your product or service can not be sold.

3.) Create Ad Group design an ad, select keywords, determine maximum cost per click that you are willing to spend and define bid amounts.

Title

The title tag is generally the most important part of the ad be sure to use a short phrase that gets the attention of your target audience. An underutilized feature at Google allows you to put a question mark in the title, the term searched on automatically replaces the question mark in the title of your ad.

Define max click Google will suggest a cost per click, but the recommendation does not need to be adhered to. Arguments have been heard that #1 position does not always mean increased sales; sometimes a second position will filter useless clicks and provide targeted traffic with a higher conversion ration. The rule of thumb is positions 13 garner the most traffic and best results. Increasing either your maximum costperclick or the ads click through rate will generally improve the adกs position.

Use keyword variations to reach more prospects. A variety or spellings and derivatives of keywords will increase the chances of your ads being served. Be sure to use common misspellings and plurals in your keyword list.

Broad match is targeting keywords in a loosely defined manner. Ads appear based on keywords that have been queried by search users. For instance, if the keywords you are planning on broad matching are กmountain bikesก and users search for the terms กbikes that can climb a mountainก, your ad will appear; as opposed to exact match, which requires that the keywords selections must exactly match the query.

Phrase match is indicated when quotations are used in the phrase. A keyword phrase set to phrase match will only appear when the exact phrase is searched on. For example กmountain bikesก will appear when searchers search for กbrand name mountain bikesก.

Exact match is when the keyword or phrase is entered with brackets. The phrase will only serve ads when the entered search phrase is identical to the keyword phrase. กMountain bikesก will only appear when searchers search for กmountain bikesก

Negative keyword is helpful in filtering unrelated phrases. A dash is entered before the filtering phrase. กMountain bike races will not appear if mountain bike races are searched on.

Landing Page is important because this not only helps with tracking, but also provides a focused and specific landing page for searchers. Information can be related to the actual search, while also increasing the conversion ratios for sales. A focused landing page with content related and using the same terminology as the actual search, will show the searcher that your solution is relevant to their needs.

3.) Define budget in order to maximize exposure Google recommends a daily budget for each campaign.

Googleกs suggested budget is helpful in receiving consistent traffic throughout the advertising campaign. Keep in mind this is only Googleกs recommendation; ultimately it is up to you to determine a budget that is affordable and suitable.

Google supplies tracking tools that assist webmasters in determining their return on investment based on keyword searches and phrases. While the technology is not perfect and cannot track phone and purchase orders, it should give advertisers a sense of what phrases and keywords are converting well in their advertising campaign.

While Google AdWords should not be your only advertising campaign, but should be a significant part of your campaign. Google AdWords can certainly help send those important targeted searchers to your website. Get started with Google AdWords at http://www.google.com/ads/

About The Author

Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.net a company specializing in alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com, and http://www.smallbusinesssoftware.net

This article was posted on August 19, 2004

by S. Housley

The ขKeyword Relevanceข Myth

The ขKeyword Relevanceข Myth

by: Jim Pryke

You’ve probably heard the standard advice about keywords.. ขFind lots of keywords that are relevant to whatever you’re selling, get lots of traffic, and you’ll make lots of salesข. Sounds sensible, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, it’s rarely that simple.

To make it clear why that is, let’s start with an extreme example. For a site selling horses, the phrase ขhorse picturesข is clearly relevant. In many ways, it looks like an ideal phrase. It gets quite a lot of searches. There is very little competition in organic listings. You can get very prominent positions for this phrase cheaply on most payperclick search engines. But you are very unlikely to ever sell a horse using the phrase ขhorse pictures.ข

Why doesn’t the phrase ขhorse picturesข generate sales? Because the people who type this phrase into the search engines are either the parents of children who want to look at pictures of horses or the children themselves. In almost every case they have no interest in buying a horse. Worse yet, they have no place to put a horse if they did purchase one. The most persuasive sales copy in the world couldn’t sell these people horses.

The phrase ขhorse picturesข connects you with the wrong person. Many other phrases connect you with the right person, but at a time when they are in the wrong mindset. If you have the right person in the wrong mindset, you will probably fail if you try to bully them into buying. But you can often make sales by leading them into the desired mindset.

How do you change someone’s mindset? It’s often easier than it sounds. Just figure out what the person wants and give them exactly that. Then immediately follow up by offering what you want them to buy.

Continuing with horses, here is an example. Imagine that most of your horses are sold to dressage enthusiasts. Let’s say that the big dressage event is called ขDressage 2005ข (not a real event as far as I know, I’m making it up for this example). Let’s also suppose, for the sake of example, that there were a huge number of searches last year for the phrase ขdressage 2004 scheduleข, so you have very strong reasons to expect a lot of searches for ขdressage 2005 scheduleข.

In order to convert a reasonable percentage of the people who search for ขdressage 2005 scheduleข into buyers, you need to create a landing page on your site that features the schedule of events for ขDressage 2005ข very prominently. Make it as clear and detailed as possible. Immediately below the schedule place a headline that presents your horses for sale as compellingly as possible, and include sales copy and / or pictures to entice visitors to check out your horses. Done properly, this solves your visitor’s problem, frees them to think about other things, creates some small measure of goodwill, and coaxes them to consider your horses for sale.

The easiest sales are made to the right people when they already have the right mindset. Phrases like ขbuy horsesข and ขhorse pricesข can put cash in your pockets, but if your market is competitive, it will be hard to get good listings in organic searches and expensive to buy them in payperclick listings.

If you master the subtle art of adjusting the mindset of your visitors, you can make money in almost any market.

Copyright 2004 Jim Pryke

About The Author

Jim Pryke provided search engine marketing expertise to his clients as president of NetInstitute Inc. for more than six years beginning in 1997. He has now moved on to a career in social services, but he can’t resist dabbling in search engine marketing and sharing his experience at http://netinstitute.com.

This article was posted on December 29, 2004

by Jim Pryke

Which Of These Words Attract Your Clients

Which Of These Words Attract Your Clients

by: Charlie Cook

Whether itกs your business card, tagline, article title, web site title and description or ad, just the difference of a few words can either pull in prospects and clients or push them away. Getting it right can determine whether your phone is ringing off the hook or you are twiddling your thumbs hoping someone will call.

Just by changing a word or two or combining a couple of phrases, you can increase your response rate dramatically. Book publishers know that a bookกs title can make the difference between it becoming a best seller or a loser. Wouldn’t you like your service and products to be best sellers?

In the past if you wanted to be sure youกd found the best name for your business or the right phrases to use in your marketing materials, you needed to hire a marketing research firm to get a reliable answer. Using phone surveys and focus groups, a market research firm can tell you which names turn prospects off and which make people want to buy your services and products.

While marketing research firms may still be the best answer for mid to large businesses, most independent professionals and small business owners, don’t budget tens of thousands of dollars for this type of indepth analysis. So how do you find out which key words and phrases will attract clients to you?

You can research and test words and phrases to dramatically increase the response to your marketing. Thanks to the development of the internet and a couple of free and almost free online tools you can easily research which words pull in prospects and which push them away. Use the steps outlined below, to refine the words you use in your marketing.

START WITH A FOCUS ON CLIENTกS PROBLEMS

Don’t make the mistake of marketing your services and products by focusing on your name, professional label, your credentials or processes. Your prospects are concerned about their own problems, issues and needs. For example, the phrase กback painก is searched for on the internet one and a half times as often as กchiropractorก.

If you’re a chiropractor, your marketing materials should focus on the pain that your clientsก experience. Start with words that focus on prospectsก problems. If you can’t think of any, use words that describe the solution to their problems. What problems and solutions are your clients looking for?

USE ATTENTION GETTING WORDS

Everyone knows that certain words like กsexก attract attention. The problem is กsexก won’t attract clients for 99.9% of small businesses. Itกs not going to help a lawyer, cleaning service, caterer, etc. Other words that get attention are how to, secrets, and free. The title of this article contains at least two attentiongetting words. Can you identify them?

FISH WHERE THE FISH ARE

Certain category phrases exist to describe most types of businesses or tasks. If you are a web designer, the phrase กweb designก is one. If you sell pyrotechnics, the more commonly used term is กfireworksก; by a factor of twentytwo. Improve the response to your marketing by using the common phrases people use to search online, the same ones used commonly in association with the services and products you sell.

Overture and Wordtracker provide free online tools to help you find the words and phrases your prospects are interested in. Make a list of all the words and phrases you think people associate with your services whether or not have a web site. Then test each phrase to find out which words attract the most attention.

The easiest tool to test word or phrase popularity is Overtureกs at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ Type in possibilities from your list and look at the how many times it was used in a search in the last month. Write the number down next to the word or phrase on your list and continue testing until you have a clear winner. Make sure the keywords you use to describe yourself, and the ones you use on your web pages to help the search engines find your site are ones your prospects use, too.

ALMOST FREE MARKET RESEARCH

Once you know the category phrase that best describes your services and products, the next step is to develop your tagline, or the copy you use in your web site description or even yellow page advertising copy. If you are a lawyer you might have a listing in the yellow pages under attorneys, but what should you say to prompt people to call your office? Do you know which of the following phrases is most likely to pull in prospects?

Free consultation for serious injuries

Need legal help?

Find the right attorney

Maximum cash compensation

Without doing some market research you won’t know which phrase, if any of these, is the most effective. Thanks to www.Google.com/adwords itกs easy to test out your ideas. Depending on the popularity of your key words and how long you run your test, it will cost twenty to fifty dollars or more at Google. You can signup, put up as many variations of your ad as you want, and see which ones people respond to. You may be surprised that changing a word or two can increase your response by factors of five or more. Once you see which phrases are working, try combining them to improve your response even more.

Even if you never run an ad, researching which phrases pull in prospects can help your business grow. Use the results on your business card, in your tagline, as the title to your web site or as the title to an article and pull in many more clients and customers.

2003 © In Mind Communications, LLC. All rights reserved.

About The Author

The author, Marketing Coach, Charlie Cook, helps independent professionals and small business owners who are struggling to attract more clients. To get the free marketing guide, ก7 Steps to Get More Clients and Grow Your Businessก visit www.charliecook.net or write [email protected]

This article was posted on October 02, 2003

by Charlie Cook

Broad, Phrase, Exact, Negative Four Google AdWor

Broad, Phrase, Exact, Negative Four Google AdWords terms you must know for advertising success

by: Rob Barrett

A few days ago, I was setting up my latest Google AdWords campaign. My brother was watching me work through the process, and he asked me:

กWhy do you put quotation marks and square brackets around some keywords?ก

I was a bit surprised to realise that I couldn’t actually answer him not in any definite way, at least. So, I set to work finding out what the matching options mean, and how they affect results.

First up is the default, Broad Match. This is where a keyword phrase is written as is, for example: google adwords

This method means that your Ad will potentially be shown to anyone searching for กgoogleก and กadwordsก, in any order and possibly with other terms. So, anyone searching for กadwords google helpก could see your Ad.

Next is Phrase Match. This is where a keyword phrase is enclosed by quotation marks, for example: กgoogle adwordsก

This is essentially the next step up from Broad Match your Ad could be shown to anyone searching for กgoogleก and กadwordsก, but only in that order, and possibly with other terms included in the search. So, กhow to start a google adwords campaignก could trigger your Ad to be shown.

The last in the กpositiveก matching options is Exact Match. This is where your keyword phrase is enclosed by square brackets, for example: [google adwords]

This is the most specific of the three types. In this case, your advert will only be shown if somebody searches for กgoogle adwordsก in that order and with no other terms.

These options each have their own merits, but generally, the more specific the search term, the higher your CTR (Click Through Rate).

If you have a small niche to start with, then Broad Match will give you the most exposure. The downside is that the large number of triggering phrases could push your CPC (cost per click) up, as a result of competition.

Larger markets require highlytargeted Ads, and this is where Exact Match (and Phrase Match, to an extent) comes into play. Imagine trying to get clicks from keywords such as กcar partsก compared to กford fiesta rear wheel bearingก. Obviously, the more specific your keyword terms, the more likely you are to get an interested visitor to your site.

The last of the keyword matching options is Negative Keyword. This is where a keyword is precluded by a minus sign, for example: tricks

This stops your Ad from being shown if somebody searches using that term. For example, กgoogle adwords tricksก would stop your Ad from being shown.

This is useful for prequalifying prospect clients if you are trying to sell something, then กfreeก would be a good term to include in your Keyword list.

Of course, as with any marketing campaign, which of these methods will work best for you is unpredictable, so always remember to test, test test!

If you need more help with setting up your Google AdWords campaign, this particular resource is one that I found useful when starting up:

Adword Equalizer (www.robbarrett.co.uk/recommendations_marketing/googleadwordequalizer.php)

Best of luck with your Google AdWords campaign!

About The Author

Rob Barrett is a professional web designer based in Dorset, England. To read more free articles on Internet Marketing and Google AdWords, visit: http://articles.robbarrett.com.

This article was posted on September 11

by Rob Barrett

Paid Search Engine Advertising

Paid Search Engine Advertising

by: John Eberhard

Over the last few years, we have seen the rise of a new medium which at the current time is quite effective in driving traffic to web sites: Paid Search Engine Advertising. This term refers to paid advertising that a company can run on search engines, so that when a person enters a specific search term or phrase, your ad appears.

For instance, if someone goes to a search engine and enters กantivirus softwareก, you will see regular search results that come up for this term, but on many search engines, you will also see paid advertising, usually labeled as กsponsored links.ก That means that some company that sells antivirus software has paid to have that listing appear when anyone enters the search term กantivirus software.ก

Similarly, if you entered กgolf equipment,ก you would see the regular listings but also a bunch of sponsored links from companies selling golf equipment.

One can choose any word or phrase at all and choose to have your ad appear when people enter that phrase on that search engine. However, you will want to select words or phrases that are at least somewhat popular, i.e. that a lot of people are entering. That way you get decent exposure for your ad.

One of the biggest advantages to this type of advertising is that you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and thus arrives at your web site. You start an account with one of these search engines, put some money in it, and every time someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site, your account is debited. This is has an advantage over most other types of advertising, where you pay whether there is any result or not. With paid search engine advertising, you only pay for actual traffic coming to your web site.

A number of regular search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, HotBot, and Lycos, are currently including sponsored links as part of their search results. For Google, the most popular of all the search engines currently, the sponsored links appear in the narrow, farright column (and sometimes along the top), whereas the regular search results appear in the wider lefthand column. Google’s paid ads program is called กAdWords.ก

There are also search engines that are called กpayperclickก search engines, where all the results are sponsored links. In other words, if you want to have your web site appear on a payperclick search engine, you have to open an advertiser account and pay money to have your listing appear.

Overture.com is the biggest of the payperclick search engines. Others include FindWhat, Search123, GoClick, Enhance Interactive, 7Search, and Kanoodle.

There are a number of other benefits to this type of advertising. First of all, with search engines, one always has the advantage that the web visitor went there specifically to get information on what you sell. If you sell antivirus software and you can put your ad in front of people that are looking for antivirus software, it doesn’t get much more targeted than that.

Secondly, it is very easy and quick to get started. In order to understand why I say it is easy to get started, we will have to explain a little about the regular search results on search engines, the way these have evolved, and what one has to go through in order to get listed high in the regular results.

Years ago, when search engines first started, the goal of the search engines was to provide relevant search results. And they have pretty much had this goal ever since. In this sense what they meant and what they were trying to do was to provide results that matched, as much as possible, what people were actually looking for when they entered a word or phrase. As an example of this, if someone went to a search engine and entered ‘ted Kennedy,ก theoretically they would want to see as the first entry, a link to Senator Kennedy’s Senate web site. Similarly, if someone entered กMicrosoft,ก the first entry he would hope to see would be the actual Microsoft web site, not a bunch of sites that were distributors for Microsoft products or a bunch of sites criticizing Microsoft.

The problem that has arisen is that, in our above example with Microsoft, the people with the web sites who were distributors of Microsoft products, or with web sites criticizing Microsoft, wanted their sites to be listed first. They wanted more traffic, and the higher you are in search engines results, the more traffic you’ll get. So what happened is that the webmasters for those other sites would study the search engines and figure out what system they were using to decide which sites would come first. Nearly all search engines make the decisions on web site rankings automatically, using a mathematical formula or algorithm.

So those other webmasters would figure out what criteria Google and Alta Vista and other search engines were using to rank sites, and they would artificially change their sites to better fit the criteria and defeat the search engines’ goal of relevancy. In other words, sites ended up being listed as #1 or very high for certain key words or phrases, that shouldn’t have been.

As a result, the criteria of the search engines to decide the rankings for web sites in their regular search results have changed dramatically and repeatedly over the years. The result of this, for webmasters, is that you have to either spend about half your life studying the search engines and what their criteria are and how to achieve good rankings in the regular results, or pay an expert to do this for you. Plus, when you make a change to your site that is calculated to improve your rankings, you will usually have to wait about two months before you will see any improvement.

So compared to that, paid search engine advertising is a much easier and faster medium. You can start an account and have your listings up and running within hours. And you don’t have to struggle through and worry about the myriad requirements of the search engines in order for you to be listed high in the regular results. Not to say you can’t do that too, but what we’re saying is that paid search engine advertising is a lot easier and currently is very effective.

Getting Started

Google is the largest of the regular search engines and Overture is the largest of the payperclicks, so we recommend that you start by setting up accounts with those two.

Determining Your Best Search Terms

One of the first things you will have to do is to select the key words or key phrases on which you will pay to have your ad appear. Here’s how we recommend you do this:

1. Try to adopt the viewpoint of a person who would be looking for your product or service. Think about what words or phrases they might type into a search engine in order to find your product or service. Start making a list.

2. Go to the web sites of one of the companies competing against you. From your browser select View | Source. This shows the HTML source code of that particular web page. Near the top you will see a paragraph like this:

This is called the metatag area of a web page, which is hidden when you view the page normally but is visible when you select View | Source. Metatags on a web site are important in order to achieve good rankings in the regular (nonpaid) search results of a search engine.

After where it says CONTENT=, and within the quotation marks, are search terms or phrases that that company thinks are significant for their product or service. Those are phrases where they hope to appear near the top of the regular listings when people type those phrases into a search engine.

For your competitors’ sites, you can figure that the phrases within the metatags area might be good search terms for you. Go to the web sites of at least 23 of your top competitors and make a list of the key phrases they use in the metatags area.

3. Test the terms for popularity. Go to this page on the Overture site:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

This is the address for Overture’s search term suggestion tool. With this tool you can enter any word or phrase, and you will then see numbers showing how many people actually entered that search term or phrase, on Overture, within the last month. It will show search numbers for the exact term you entered, plus a number of similar terms. This is an incredibly valuable tool because it gives you a relative idea of how popular a search term is.

This tool doesn’t tell you, of course, how many people searched that term on the entire web. It only shows how many searched it on Overture. But for example, if you enter a search phrase and the tool shows that only 50 people searched for it on Overture within the last month, you know that’s not a very popular search phrase. But if you find that 75,000 searched for that phrase, then you know that it is a pretty popular search term. So it gives you a great idea of relative popularity.

Use the tool to check the popularity of each of the search phrases on your list. Since the tool shows search numbers for similar phrases as well, it will give you ideas for other terms you may not have thought of.

Ideally you want to find search phrases that have good numbers, but stay away from very general phrases or single words, like กgolf,ก or กcomputers,ก or กgames.ก Try to use multiple words to more exactly specify your product or services, like กgolf equipmentก or กgolf instructionก or กinstructional golf videosก. For one thing, the competition will be fierce for words like กgolfก and the bids will be very high (more about bids later). So try to get more specialized phrases that more exactly describe what you do. That way, you will not only have less competition for those key phrases, but you will not be wasting your ad on people who are not looking for exactly what you do.

Tips on Search Terms for a Local Business

One of the characteristics of the web is that it is worldwide. People looking for products and services via search engines could be coming from anywhere in the world. Now if you sell products or services to anyone, anywhere in the world, that’s a good thing.

But what if you sell products only to people in a specific geographical area? Like a local retail store, printing shop or real estate agency? Then it becomes a bad thing, because you could be dealing with leads and inquiries from Bangkok, Sydney, Paris or Moscow. For some businesses these กleadsก would essentially be a waste of time. And if you’re paying for them with paid search engine advertising, they’re a waste of money.

An excellent way to bypass this problem for businesses that can only service a small geographical area is to choose key phrases that include the name of the city or area in them. Like กgolf equipment burbank,ก กreal estate glendale,ก or กrestaurants santa monica.ก We have used this technique with good success. You won’t eliminate all people from outside your area, but it will definitely narrow down things to people who are looking for that type of product or service in your city.

We also recommend that you use specific smaller city or neighborhood names, rather than the name of the whole metro area – Glendale, Pasadena, or Burbank rather than Los Angeles. This is especially true if you only service that section of the metro area.

Bids and Bidding

For paid search engine advertising, during the process of setting up your account and your ads that are connected to specific key phrases, you will be asked how much money you want to bid for that key word. In other words, how much money you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site.

Before making the bidding decision for Overture, you need to find out what other advertisers are already bidding for each search phrase. This is vital to know, because bidding determines where your ad appears in the results. If you bid higher than anyone else for that search phrase, your ad will appear as the #1 listing. So what you bid in relation to the other advertisers determines how high your results will appear, and have a major affect on how many people see your ad and therefore how many click on it and go to your site.

Go to the home page of the Overture site and enter the key phrase you want to set up an ad for. You will see the current sites that are advertising for that search phrase now. In the upper right hand corner you will see a link that says กView Advertisers’ Max Bids.ก Click on this. You will be asked to enter some letters and/or numbers in a box. Then you will see all the ads, along with the bids. For example, at the time this was written, if you entered กantivirus softwareก and clicked on the advertisers’ bids, you would see that the #1 advertiser bid $2.02, the #2 advertiser bid $2.01, the #3 advertiser bid $1.39, the #4 advertiser bid $1.38, the #5 advertiser bid $1.10, and so on.

In this case กantivirus softwareก is a fairly competitive key phrase, so the bids are fairly high.

If you wanted to set up an ad for the key phrase กantivirus software,ก you would then know how much you would have to bid in order to be at whatever position you wanted to be in. In the example above, you would need to bid at least $2.03 to be in the #1 position.

It is definitely not necessary to be in the #1 position in order to get people coming to your web site. In the example above, the company in the #10 position bid 92 cents, which is less than half of the bid for the #1 position.

How much you should bid for a given key word or phrase depends on several factors:

a. What is the price for your product or service and how much is the profit? For instance, if you deliver a service and the average cost of that service is $3,500, with a profit of $1,000 on each delivery of that service, then you can afford to bid some money. However, if you sell something for $12.99 and your profit on each item is $6.00, then you have to bid relatively low.

b. What is the conversion rate on your web site? In other words, of all the people that go to your web site or go to a specific page that sells a specific product, how many of them actually buy the product? Or for lead generation for higher ticket items, what percentage fill out the form sending you their contact information and thus become a lead?

The conversion rate is important, because not every person who clicks on your ad on Overture is going to do what you want them to do on your site. For example, you might bid $1.00 for a specific phrase on Overture. Then by monitoring how many people click on your ad, and then comparing that to how many actually become leads, you might find that 10% of the people who click through to your site actually fill out your form and become a lead. So each person who clicks through to your site will cost you $1.00, but since only 10% of them fill out your lead form, then each lead will cost you $10.00.

This relates to profitability and how much you can afford to spend per lead or sale.

c. How much do you want to spend? If you want to be aggressive and get a lot of people coming to your web site, bid higher. If you want to be careful and not spend a lot of money, bid lower.

In general we recommend bidding an amount that will cause your listing to be somewhere between the #10 and #1 positions. This will ensure in most cases (depending on how many people are entering that search term) that you get a decent amount of traffic. However, you can bid any amount.

You can also start by bidding a certain amount, monitor how many clickthroughs you’re getting each day, and also monitor how many conversions you’re getting each day. You can modify your bid amount for any given key phrase, after you see how the traffic, clickthroughs and conversions are going.

Currently, Overture will take the ads in the top three positions for each search phrase, and those ads will also appear on Yahoo, MSN and some other search engines as sponsored links. So that’s additional exposure, if you’re willing to bid high enough to get into the top three.

For Google you have to watch and see where your listings come out in the rankings, then modify your maximum bid if you want them to go higher.

Most of the regular search engines and payperclick search engines will allow you to set up a budget or limit on how much money you get charged in any given day. Let’s say you set your daily limit at $20.00. That means that each day, as people are seeing your ad and clicking through on it and going to your site, your account will get charged up to the limit of $20.00 for that day. When and if it hits that limit, your ads will be turned off for the rest of the day. You can set your limit for whatever you want. In this way you can control the expense.

Writing Your Ad

The next important issue is the writing of your ad. The ad will consist of a headline, ad text, and an Internet address. On Google AdWords, you get a strict limit of number of characters per line for the headline, text and Internet address, because the ads are pretty small. On Overture, you can make them quite a bit longer.

Usually the headline will appear in bold. So you want to grab the person’s attention with your headline. It is usually a good idea to include the key phrase in the headline, though this is not a hard and fast rule.

In earlier chapters we talked about doing surveys on your target public, and thus getting an idea of what motivates them, what their problems are (that your product solves), and what benefits they feel your product or service will give them. In writing your ad, you want to utilize the survey results, especially the benefit and problem items.

One of the many advantages of paid search engine advertising is that you can write your ad copy, and put the ad up, and then see what the response is, and if it does poorly, it basically doesn’t cost you anything.

Bear in mind that these search engines expect you to get a certain level of response, so if your ads are doing poorly they may lower them in the rankings or even suspend your ads from certain key phrases. They are businesses of course, and have to make a buck too.

But the point is that you can experiment with different wording for your ad and your headline. Whenever you make a change, record that in a folder with the date, so that when your response goes up or down, you know what the change was that caused it and when that change was made.

Your Landing Page

When you set up your ad on Google, Overture or one of the other search engines, you will have to choose a กlanding pageก for the ad. That’s the page where the person lands when he clicks on your ad. A few tips on how to work your landing pages:

1. In most cases, it is best NOT to have the landing page be the home page of your site. We recommend in most cases to create a new page whose sole purpose is to be a landing page for that paid ad on one of the search engines.

2. Do not put links on the landing page to the rest of your site. Design the page so that the only thing they can do on that page is fill out the form you want them to fill out. This will always increase response, and giving them full navigational buttons to every other page under the sun on your site will always lower response. Giving them only one option controls the process to a much greater degree.

3. Design the landing page so that there is a bit of sales text on the top of the page, including any graphics as needed, and then there is a form on the lower part of the page. If possible, do not make them click through to yet another page to fill out the form or buy the product.

4. Create a separate landing page for each of your ad campaigns for each of the search engines. In other words, if you are advertising your widgets on Google and Overture, create a landing page for your ad on Google and a separate landing page for the Overture ad.

The reason for this is that when you create the form, there is a line in the HTML code where you can specify what the subject line of the email will be, when the person clicks กsubmitก and the form contents are emailed to you. We recommend giving 4digit codes to all promotions that you, so give one code to the Google ad and a different code to the Overture one. Then when the emails arrive, you’ll be able to tell how well your ads are doing on each search engine.

Managing and Measuring Your Campaign

On both Google and Overture, by logging into your account you can see various statistics on your account. You can also compare your results on your site with these statistics. Here are the most important things to look for in measuring how you’re doing:

a. Impressions: These are the number of people that saw your ad, meaning they entered that specific key word or phrase, and your ad appeared. You can see the total impressions by day, for the week, and you can break it out so you can see the impressions for specific key phrases.

High impressions means that you have selected key phrases that a lot of people are entering.

b. Clickthroughs: This means the number of people that, having seen your ad, clicked on it and arrived on your landing page. The search engines will show the clickthroughs as a raw number and also as a percentage compared to the impressions.

High clickthrough percentages means you have been successful in writing an ad that a good percentage of people were interested enough to click on, to go to your site.

c. Conversion Rate: This means the percentage of people that clicked through and went to your site, that actually did what you wanted them to do. If you are selling products right on the site, the conversion rate means what percentage of people that arrived there actually bought the product. If you are advertising to generate leads, the conversion rate is the percentage of people that clicked through that filled out the form and sent you their information.

The conversion rate is a measure of success of your landing page. If you are getting good conversion rates that means you have done a good job of writing and designing the landing page. If your conversion rate is poor, that means you need to look again at the landing page and figure out where you could change it to make it better, or at what points you might be losing people.

In our experience:

1. A good clickthrough percentage is anything over 0.5%. If you are getting 1.0% or better, that’s pretty good. If you are getting less than 0.5%, you should test some changes to your ad.

2. A good conversion rate is anything from 10% to 50%. The highest conversion rate we have ever gotten on a web site is 50%. If you are getting 10% or less, you should test some changes to your landing page and try to improve it.

Remember that a poor clickthrough percentage is a reflection of your search engine ad, not your landing page. So make changes to your ad, not your landing page, when trying to improve it.

And likewise remember that a poor conversion rate is a reflection of your landing page, so make any needed changes there.

Summary

In the constantly changing landscape of the Internet and Internet marketing, paid search engine advertising is currently a very successful tool. We recommend you try it sooner rather than later.

About The Author

© Copyright 2005 by John Eberhard and realWebMarketing.net. All Rights Reserved.

John Eberhard is a marketing consultant in the Los Angeles area, is President of RealWebMarketing.net, and has been involved in marketing in a variety of industries for the past 16 years. He can be reached at: http://www.realwebmarketing.net/contact.html.

[email protected]

This article was posted on February 16, 2005

by John Eberhard

An Informational Website Provides the Ultimate Fle

An Informational Website Provides the Ultimate Flexibility When You Are Ready to Create a Domain Name

by: Syd Johnson

Content is King

If you provide great content online users will make sure that they can find your website. You can create a domain with hyphens, longer phrases and words. You don’t want to use the 67 character maximum allowed for domain names, but 15 plus characters is totally acceptable.

To make your domain name memorable, it should be a short phrase that describes your website, your products or your particular area of expertise. If you provide reliable, accurate information, web users can use bookmarks or type the phrase directly into a search engine to get back to your site. This means that you will have to really focus on getting your domain name listed on as many search engines and directories as possible.

The other advantage to creating a domain name for an informational site is that most surfers search by typing in phrases and entire sentences into the search engines. A domain name that uses all of the words of a small phrase or sentence will easily filter to the top of the listing and keep your customers coming back.

Hot tip: If you don’t trust the engines to help your customers find you on a regular basis, make it easy for anyone to bookmark your site with a reminder button on your home page.

About The Author

Syd Johnson is the Executive Editor of RapidLingo.com, Financial Solutions Website. You can see more articles at http://www.rapidlingo.com.

This article may be freely distributed as long as the authorกs bio is included with an active link to http://www.rapidlingo.com.

This article was posted on October 28, 2004

by Syd Johnson

Search Engine Copywriting: Focus on One Topic

Search Engine Copywriting: Focus on One Topic

by: Nick Usborne

Perhaps the simplest of all the lessons I have learned about writing for search engines is to keep my pages simple. That is to say, whether I am thinking about my readers or about Google, there is a huge advantage to keeping most of your pages confined to a single topic.

There are three approaches I take to the creation of a page, and each has a significant impact on how high the listing for that page appears on Google.

>>>> #1 – When I don’t think about Google and cover multiple topics.

There are times when a page is put up simply for the benefit of my readers and, for one reason or another, covers a number of different topics.

A simple example of this would be a page in the Excess Voice newsletter archives. I archive all issues, so visitors can browse their way through previous articles and reviews.

>From Google’s point of view, these pages are very unfocused. A particular newsletter might include an article on one subject, a review on another and reader feedback on yet another. As a result, Google sees a mix of unrelated topics, gives a digital shrug, and rewards me with a horrible listing across a variety of keywords and phrases.

>>>> #2 – When I do think about Google and cover multiple topics.

Let’s say I am reviewing a service of a fairly general nature. As an example, we’ll pick a site that offers a variety of marketing services for companies online. My review may cover search engine optimization, newsletters, buying AdWords, buying newsletter ads and banners.

In other words, by the nature of the services being offered, my review tackles a number of different topics. However, I’d like to get some Google traffic to that page, so I might even use WordTracker to find some good key phrases. Then I’ll include that phrase in the page title, meta tags and in the headings and text.

Will that help me? Probably not. The problem is that Google will find my key phrase, take a peek at my text for related phrases, but then find a whole bunch of unrelated topics. The result? Page 10 on Google for my key phrase.

>>>> #3 – When I hardly think of Google at all, but focus on just one topic.

This is when I deliberately confine my page to a single topic. Sometimes I give very little, if any thought to keywords or Google. I simply write a good page on a single topic. I write for the reader.

What happens? Quite naturally, I will find that my page title, meta tags, headlines, subheads and text all include a logical key word or phrase, and the text is filled, quite naturally, with related phrases.

Will this page do well on Google? That depends. If the topic is very general, like ‘advertising’, then probably not. But if the topic is more focused, within a smaller niche, like ‘advertising in German ezines’, then I’ll probably do very well indeed.

>>>> Concluding thoughts

A lot of the time, trying to get a high listing simply by packing in keywords and phrases will do you very little good.

If I have learned one thing over the last few years, it is that if I want a high listing, I need to do just one thing:

Write a simple, focused page on a single, niche topic

On top of that, if you use WordTracker or a similar tool to find a relevant and strong, high demand/low supply key phrase, you’ll do even better.

About The Author

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author, speaker and advocate of good writing. You can access all his archived newsletter articles on copywriting and writing for the web at http://www.excessvoice.com/archive

[email protected]

This article was posted on January 16

by Nick Usborne

How to Build Massive Keyword Lists Part 1

How to Build Massive Keyword Lists Part 1

by: Rob Taylor

As keyword marketing becomes more and more expensive and competitive, it has become essential when building your lists to focus on the maximum number of phrases and their variations that a surfer might enter into the search engines.

Why?

Because according to Amit Singhal, principal scientist at Google, a guy who really should know what heกs talking about, over 50% of the 200 million searches performed a day have never been searched before. He also said: กWhen performing a search most surfers give a 24 word queryก.

So here are my top 18 recommended ways to build massive keyword lists:

1. Visit your competitorกs web pages and look in the title and meta tags.

2. Search for brand names in Googleกs Sandbox. This will return additional keywords that searchers entered when using the brand name. You can also enter regular keyword phrases and get related keyword phrases that have been searched on Google.

Link: https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

3. Look over your past customer testimonials, and see if there are any keywords you can use. This strategy lets you get inside your customerกs mind to produce more market centric keywords.

4. Consider synonyms. A synonym is a word having the same or nearly the same meaning as another word or other words in the language. Enter your keywords into Rogetกs Theasaurus for a list of related synonyms. Also visit LexFN.

Links: http://thesaurus.reference.com & http://www.lexfn.com

5. Think of singular and plurals keywords.

6. What about verbs? Example: Ride, rode, ridden, ridding, rides.

7. Use hyphenation and variations. Example: offshore, offshore, off shore.

8. Consider domain names. Many people enter domain names into the search engines rather than their browser address bar. Example: cnn.com. In June 2005 cnn.com was searched 843,256 times on Overture.com.

9. Get books on your subject and use the terms in the index and glossaries to grow your keyword lists.

10. Download a free copy of Weblog Expert Lite. Then ask your web host how to download your raw stats files. Run them through the software and you will then discover every possible keyword combination that surfers have used to find your website.

Link: http://www.megastep.com/wle

11. Use Wordtracker. What does Wordtracker do? ก… helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business or service many of which you might never have considered.ก Wordtracker is an essential tool to use.

Link: http://www.keywordlistbuilder.co.uk

12. Then go to the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Enter in a keyword and Overture returns all the prior monthกs searches that include your phrase. The problem with the Overture tool is that it doesn’t give you the exact way that the search was entered. This is why it is essential to use a tool like Keyword Tumbler (see # 18) to generate the maximum possible number of keyword combinations that a user might enter a search phrase into the engines.

Link: http://inventory.overture.com

13. Use abbreviations and misspellings. A good misspelling tool is Search Spell. Search Spell uses actual misspellings entered into the search engines. Misspelled Keywords is another software tool that will literally create thousands of misspellings for any given keyword phrase you enter into it.

Link: http://www.searchspell.com/typo &

http://www.misspelledkeywords.co.uk

14. Use acronyms. An acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a name. Example: due diligence becomes DD. A good acronym generator is Acronym Finder.

Link: http://www.acronymfinder.com

15. Combine your keyword phrase into one word. Example: strawbale houses => strawbalehouses.

16. Use กspaceก and ก+ก with keywords. Example:

strawbale+houses

strawbale +houses

17. Visit Crossword Compiler and download their demo software. Plug in your keywords and discover a multitude of additional words.

Link: http://www.crosswordcompiler.com

18. Once you have your list compiled visit Keyword Tumbler and download the free software. Put your keywords into a text file and then let Keyword Tumbler generate multiple variations of each keyword phrase you have… instantly!

Link: http://www.keywordtumbler.com

It does this simply by mixing the words in each phrase around. Example: กhorses for saleก generates a list like this…

horses for sale

horses sale for

for horses sale

for sale horses

sale horses for

sale for horses

As Perry Marshall, author of the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords said at a recent seminar: กEvery combination of keywords that somebody could conceivably type in on Google is a market.ก

Link: http://www.megastep.com/pm

I hope you have found this advice useful? Itกs the exact same procedure I use everyday when fighting the payperclick wars.

About The Author

Rob Taylor has been marketing online since 1996. Take advantage of his battle tested marketing strategies that could quietly make you five figure cash profits every month. Subscribe free to his high content newsletter at http://www.megastep.com.

This article was posted on August 1

by Rob Taylor