EzSEO Newsletter # 91

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EzSEO Newsletter # 91

Andy Williams ez SEO

ez-search-engine-optimization.com

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This week:

1. Google Talk

2. Building Affiliate Sites – Miniseries Part III

Hi again.
This week I am sitting here with air conditioning on. At 9am the temperature was already 28C (82F), and it has continued rising since. Walking outside is like walking into an oven, and to make it worse, Tenerife is so humid.

As you can imagine, it is tempting to put the newsletter off until later in the week, and go to the beach instead ;o)

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1. Google Talk
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Earlier this week I was chatting to Colin McDougall (author of The Positive Mind) using Google’s new utility “Google Talk”. Google Talk allows you to talk to other computer owners without having to pay telephone charges. I expect Google to eventually introduce the ability to call land lines too for much reduced rates (much like Skype).

Many of you will probably have used Skype or Microsoft Messenger 7 for this – they are both excellent tools. If you want to try another, Google Talk is quite impressive.

You will need a gmail account to use Google Talk.

Last week I mentioned Colin’s new eBook “The Positive Mind“.
Colin was telling me that he has had some great feedback on his book, and he would like even more. If you bought the book, let him know what you think. He is already working on upgrades based on feedback, and will send the upgrades to existing customers when ready.

One of the suggestions that a lot of people have asked for is a little more insight into Colin McDougall himself. Colin is a very successful internet marketer and obviously has a lot to share, so look out for the upgrades soon.

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2. Building Affiliate Sites – Miniseries Part III
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Last week we discussed how you can identify profitable niches. This is often one of the most difficult aspects of creating a website, but hopefully last week made that task a little easier.

If you are following along with this course, you should have already found your niche idea, and checked for profitability. The next step is to carry out the keyword research.

With lots of great HTML editors available, it is relatively easy to build a great looking website. However, much more important than how your website looks, is how your website is found by potential customers.

Your job in this stage of the process is to find out the exact phrases that people type into the search engines, when they are looking for information or products relating to your niche.

Example. Your website is about fly fishing. On it, you promote fishing tackle, rods, reels etc etc. If I was a fly fisherman looking to buy a reel, what am I going to type into Google to find relevant sites where I might buy a reel? After all, that is what you need to know as the webmaster behind a fly fishing site.

I might type in any of the following:

fly fishing reel
buy fly fishing reel
fly fishing reel review

and so on.

However, just because you think of a phrase related to this niche, does not mean that anyone is actually searching for the phrases you think of. That is where keyword research tools come into play.

Doing a quick search at Wordtracker for “fly fishing reel” returns 45 phrases that people are actually looking for.

Wordtracker also provides me with essential data, like how many people are looking for each phrase, and how many competing web pages there are for each term.

There are a lot of keyword research tools available, so which one should you choose?

I use 2 tools myself, but for different purposes. My basic keyword research is always done with Wordtracker. I have 100% faith in the data returned from Wordtracker based on the results I have seen from various keywords I have targeted over the years. I cannot say the same for other tools which use Overture’s Keyword Suggestion tool for “demand” data.

Let me tell you a true story.

*** True Story ***

“A couple of years ago, I carried out keyword research for a web page I was creating about pheromones. I was going to send my traffic to a merchants site and get commission on any sale generated. Using the Overture tool, I found 4 or 5 terms with reportedly 47000 + searches in recent weeks…. and that is just at Overture.

I thought, hey, great. There should be several times this many searches originating from Google. I created a couple of pages and optimized them. I got #1 position on MSN, and later, #1 on Google too for some of my chosen terms.

When I saw my rankings, I could see the $$$ signs in front of my eyes. Two days later I had received just 6 visitors to my top ranking pages. My millions were melting away before my eyes.

I checked on WordTracker and found that in the last month, there has only been 41 searches for my main keyword according to Wordtracker (1 or 2 searches a day)”.

*** End Story ***

There are various reasons why Overture’s tool over-estimates values for certain keywords, but we don’t have time to go into that now.

Let’s just take a quick example – you can try it yourself if you want. Overture’s tool is at:

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

Searching Overture’s tool for “fly fishing reel” returns the following top 3 results:

fly fishing reel 2522
fly fishing rods and reel 462
discount fly fishing reel 121

Doing the same search on Wordtracker returns these figures for those top 3 Overture phrases:

fly fishing reels 272
fly fishing rods and reels 74
discount fly fishing reels 61

Now to compare oranges with oranges we need to manipulate these results, since the ones from Overture are for July 2005, whereas the ones from Wordtracker are from the last 3 months.

Let’s divide Wordtracker’s figures by 3 to give us one month total (OK, this is not accurate since we cannot guarantee that each of the three months will have similar numbers of searches, but it is all we have got).

So for 1 month of searches, Wordtracker reports:

fly fishing reels 91
fly fishing rods and reels 25
discount fly fishing reels 20

For the phrase “fly fishing reel”, Overture says it was searched for 2522 times in July, whereas Wordtracker puts that figure closer to 100.

For the phrase “fly fishing rods and reels”, Overture says 462, Wordtracker says 25.

For the phrase “discount fly fishing reels”, Overture says 121, Wordtracker says 20.

Not convinced? What I suggest you do, is try this experiment with several different phrases.

e.g. My old search on Overture for “pheromone” suggests that the phrase pheromone was searched for 103,890 time in July 2005. Wordtracker tells me that in the last 120 days, pheromone was searched for 332 times.

Which do I believe? Wordtracker of course.

So where does this leave all the keyword tools that are available?

My advice is this. If you find a keyword tool that looks promising, ask yourself this:

1. Does this tool also provide supply and demand figures for each phrase?

Without supply and demand, the phrases are useless, because there is no way of choosing the highest demand, lowest competition phrases from the list. Many of the phrases may have hundreds of thousands of competing pages in Google. If you don’t have these figures, how can you be accurately target phrases?

If supply and demand is supplied, the next question to ask is:

2. Where does the data come from?

If the data comes from Overture, would you trust it? I know I wouldn’t.

I have not yet found a tool as good or as accurate as Wordtracker for keyword research.

Now, I mentioned above that I use two keyword research tools. Once is obviously Wordtracker.

The other is a tool by Goran Nagy’s called Keyword Analyzer.

This tool has undergone amazing transformations in both looks and functionality in the last couple of years.

The reason I use this tool is not to find the keywords, but to find out information on Adsense bids for the keywords I have identified using Wordtracker. I wont go into the features of Keyword Analyzer here, as it is not really relevant to this miniseries. If you are using Pay Per Click Advertising though, this tool is amazing.

OK. I hope that I have persuaded you that Wordtracker is the #1 choice for professionals who want accurate information.

Your next step is to use Wordtracker to research your niche.

If you have not read my Wordtracker Tutorial, now is the time to do so. Your task for this week is:

1. Print off my Wordtracker Tutorial.

Copy and paste the URL into your web browser.

2. Use the trial version of Wordtracker, or buy a one day subscription to Wordtracker and follow my tutorial to research keywords for your niche. You should go as far as finding competition for all your phrases, and email a merged email to yourself containing all your phrases (you should have found 1000+ phrases).

Next week, we will look at how you can work with this keyword list, how to sort your list into groups, and the ideas behind these different groups.

Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here at my blog.

For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old ezSEO Newsletter archives.

Have a great week!

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