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Keyword Strategy Studio (build 02-28-08 and after) supports specifying a market region for your keyword and competition research. This option is available in the New Project dialog. You can select any of the following regions...
Keyword Strategy Studio is currently available as a part of IM Toolpad and may be downloaded (free trial download) from here.
Did you know that you can use the built-in domain name filter in some of our domain name management software products (Domain Punch Professional and Watch My Domains ISP) to pick and choose exactly the domains you want?
The built-in domain name filter is available under the Domain List > Add Names After Filtering a List menu option.
Your domain name list should be available in a text file (comma, tab or newline separated).
To filter a domain list...
Doing Only Automated Keyword Research!
This is a very common mistake because of sales pages promoting software products that claim to automate everything. The only problem with automating your keyword research is that a real human being can always come up with better solutions and strategies any time.
Automated keyword research tools base their results on factors like search popularity (mostly supplied by a third party tool) and search result counts. As we have already seen these are no longer good indicators of keyword search volumes, demand or supply.
A good keyword research requires careful consideration of multiple factors like regional and seasonal trends, the search context, if searches are from actual customers willing to spend money and so on. So use a software tool or use an on-line research for preliminary analysis and then brainstorm with the help of a few intelligent human beings to decide the keywords you want to target. Another surefire way is to use a pay per click search engine and actually test your keywords.
Automation is best when applied to repetitive tasks that require no application of thought. So use automated tools to multiple your keyword lists (long tail keyword generation), cleanup keyword lists, etc.
Not Managing Your Keyword Lists Properly!
Once you realize that it is simply not possible to accurately find the actual keyword search volumes, you will also realize the one simple, basic fact regarding keywords...
There are no best keywords for a web page... there are only the keywords that happen to work for that web page!
If you have been running websites for a while you would have already accumulated a number of important keyword phrases that are highly relevant to each of your web pages. You should give your keyword lists the importance it deserves. Your log files and site statistics will tell you which keyword phrases got you the sales. You will also know which keyword phrases do not convert. These data are gold and should be managed properly using spreadsheets or a software.
This is even more important if you use pay per click advertisements. The success of any pay per click advertisement depends on your keyword lists, the advertisement text used for the keywords, your landing page and of course the product or service on offer. The only way to optimize this is to use different advertisement groups and associate each group with its own keywords and advertisement texts.
This leads to the most important thing you can do as part of your Keyword Strategy...
You can use a software like Keyword Strategy Studio to do this more easily.
Constraining Your Keyword Research Based On Wrong Assumptions!
Do you ignore a keyword phrase simply because it appears to have low search count? Do you target only the keywords that have the so called high demand and low supply?
This is another very common mistake that is made for a variety of different reasons!
Concentrating only on high search volume keywords or keywords with low search result counts
In the early days of the Internet it was common for marketers to decide on the viability of targeting a specific keyword phrase by checking the search volume and then checking to see if the keyword phrase results in a large or small number of web pages when searched in Google (or any other search engine). Only keyword phrases with large search volumes (demand) and low search result counts (supply) were then used. This is termed Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI for short).
This method has long since lost its appeal.
The concept of deciding if a keyword phrase has large supply based on the search result counts is not a good method anymore because the web is full of junk sites created using automated tools. Remember that the world wide web is also growing rapidly.
The viability of ranking high for a keyword phrase is mostly based on how many high quality web pages are ranked in the search engines. Even for keywords that have millions of search results, there may be only a handful of quality web pages in the search engine results. The rest will be made up of junk automated pages or Made For Google Adsense pages.
Even if Google shows 3 million search results for a keyword the actual relevant, displayed results are mostly less than a thousand!
You can easily verify this by scrolling through the Google search result pages. After a few pages you will see a message like...
"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 915 already displayed."
What this means is that, in many cases you can reach the top 30-50 places in search rankings with basic keyword optimization. The real competition comes after that. So, just high number of search engine results should never scare you off!
What is really important is a proper competition research and not a decision based on how many web pages are listed by a search engine in its search results!
Not considering Multi Word Keyword Phrases (Long Tail Keywords)
The web is so vast today that many times it is almost impossible to find anything useful by typing in a single keyword into a search engine. So people have learned to search better by typing in more combinations of words. Besides it is pointless to search for
car rental
when you require to rent a car in Seattle. A more appropriate query will be
car rental seattle
or
seattle auto rental
or
cheap seattle car rental
or
budget car rental seattle
and so on...
So if you optimize your site only for car rental your web page will be just one among the millions and you will find it very hard to obtain and maintain top search engine results. Instead, go for additional words that include the region (state, county, city) or any other possible words that your customer will type in.
In many instances it will be necessary to create additional keyword phrases by simply adding city names and or other words to existing keywords. You can easily do this using a software like Keyword-Pad or Keyword Strategy Studio.
Looking For Keywords Based On High PPC Costs
Do you only look for keywords that have very high PPC costs? The cost per click values are not always a good indication of anything. In many industries large companies simply set high cost per click values for generic terms. Remember that the indicated PPC costs are mostly the maximum they are willing to pay and not what they actually pay.
Forgetting Low Search Volume Keywords Used By the Experts and the Savvy
There are a number of keywords in every industry that are never popular enough (among the general population) to show up in regular keyword research tools. However these keywords may be used by the Internet savvy and expert users.
Always make sure that your web pages contain the relevant industry keywords and other lateral phrases. If your product or services cater to corporate or business clients this is even more important.
Obsessing About The Exact Keyword Search Counts!
One of the most common questions asked on-line is about the accuracy of keyword search counts as provided by various sources (Overture suggestion tool, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and other tools).
Invariably some one will come around and declare a particular resource to be the most accurate.
Is it?
Internet contains thousands of search engines in hundreds or more languages. Many searches are seasonal and a substantial number of searches are done by Internet Marketers themselves as part of their keyword research. While this will not affect popular categories it will pollute the search volume counts in less popular niche subjects. Many words have a different meaning depending on the context and it is not always possible to know what the search was really for.
The top search engines do have information about searches that take place through their servers. However they keep this information to themselves or provide only a sketchy data for our consumption.
The big three search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) do provide keyword suggestion tools. However the information available through these are in graphical trend formats (Google), out of date and heavily abused (Yahoo Overture Tool) or almost like a test toy (MSN adlabs). They also offer slightly better versions for their paid advertisers.
For a list of on-line keyword suggestion tools from popular search engines please see
http://www.goodkeywords.com/support/onlinetools.php
Third party keyword research sources extrapolate their data from a small sample collected from one or more sources. For example, Wordtracker database is made up of Metacrawler/Dogpile queries that makes up approximately 0.63% of the search engine market (quoted from Wordtracker site).
Search Volume Information Through ISPs
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) do have logs that provide information about what their customers search for. This will provide a reasonably good indication of keyword search counts. However most reputable ISPs will not release such information because of privacy laws. A few years back AOL released some keyword research data by mistake and there was a huge outcry. AOL was forced to remove the information from public and issue an apology.
However it may be possible to obtain limited information from smaller local ISPs, tabulate and extrapolate the data.
Search Volume Information From PPC Advertisements
The best method to find potential traffic from various keyword phrases is to run test pay per click advertisements on Google, Yahoo and MSN. You can tweak your cost per click settings to find the maximum number of impressions you get in a day. Be sure to use proper negative keywords to remove unwanted keyword combinations. Use Keyword Strategy Studio (available in IM Toolpad) to generate your keyword lists and to manage them.
Stop worrying about exact search counts, instead, concentrate on finding keyword phrases your customers are likely to type in while searching the Internet.
Avoiding Keyword Research Completely!
Do you completely avoid Keyword Research? Surprisingly this is something a large but silent majority of people do. Some think it is a waste of time and some, despite knowing the importance of keyword research, forget about it or find no time to do it.
The truth is, even a very basic keyword research and a subsequent web page tweak can get you rich rewards.
One of the justifications often used for not doing keyword research is that getting inbound links is much more important. While having a large number of other sites linking to you is very useful (and important) not doing keyword research is a very big mistake.
Search engines base their ranking based on a number of factors including the inbound links. However the structure and content of the web page is still the most important criteria for deciding if a web page is a match for a certain search query. If you have no relevant keywords on your web page that indicate a connection to what the search engine user has typed in, there is no way for the search engine to figure out that your web page is a good match.
Even the other sites that link to you are likely to use the title of your page or any other keyword combination on your own pages to create the anchor texts. So using good keywords on your site is likely to improve the benefits from inbound links too.
Not doing keyword research can also cause your web pages not to have some of the very important industry specific words. A simple keyword research can easily uncover a large list of important keywords missing from your web page copy.
Basic, minimum, keyword research
Here is the least you can do... Brainstorm with a few other people and generate a number of keyword phrases that your customers may type in while searching on the Internet. Use a free keyword research tool (Google Keyword Tool, Word Tracker, Good Keywords, etc) to expand the list. For even better results use Keyword Strategy Studio to find hundreds of highly relevant keyword phrases.
Tweaking your web pages
IM Toolpad includes a software called Website Explorer that allows you to check web pages for anchor texts, description tag, titles, headings etc. Use it to study and tweak your web pages.
Have you ever had to look at the contents of large text files? Most Windows applications will fail when the file has more than a few million lines of text.
IM Toolpad includes a toolkit that can open and show the contents of large files (upto 4GB or 100 million lines long). The screen shot below shows the ".com" domain zone file opened in IMToolpad toolkit.
In addition to the above tool IM Toolpad also includes a number of essential network tools for managing your sites.
Did you know that the new Keyword Strategy Studio can display keywords and titles of web pages in languages other than English?
Please note that the support for non-English languages is somewhat experimental. There are a number of difficulties in identifying the right words in other languages because of the differences in grammar. However you can still use it to find the top titles and the visible keywords in other languages.
You will need the regional / language support options setup in your Windows system for the fonts to display properly.
You can download a free trial copy from IM Toolpad
IM Toolpad is a powerful software suite for keyword brainstorming, web page analysis, tweaking, website monitoring, competition research, sales strategy implementation and more...
Simple Loan Calculator is a small Windows software for analyzing loan payments. Calculate loan details including monthly payments, balance after each month, view the amortization schedule, etc. You can obtain a demo copy here.
Purchase co-branded version for $97
You can also get specially rebranded versions with additional features. Please contact us for more options on this.
