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Out Of Keyword Ideas? These 7 Tools Will Help

April 27, 2010

My latest search engine land column is out titled Out Of Keyword Ideas? These 7 Tools Will Help.

It takes a look at some tools which can help jumpstart your thought processes about keyword research.

The tools covered are:

• Microsoft adCenter labs search funnels
• Xenu Link Sleuth
• Google & Microsoft Search Query Reports
• Search Based Keyword Tool
• The thesaurus
• Web Seer
• Wordtracker Labs: Keyword Questions

My two favorite ways to jumpstart keyword research before going down to these tools are:

• Spider sites of related content
• Write a simple story

When those two methods fail me, then the above tools take over to help get me started on new ideas.

Strike Keyword Gold By Writing A Simple Story

March 30, 2010

My latest Search Engine Land article is now published title:  Strike Keyword Gold By Writing A Simple Story.

Most keyword research is done upon existing words by using keyword tools. However, there are other ways to discover completely new keywords that involves creating use case scenarios for your products and services.

By either writing these cases or using your product teams use cases, you can find entirely new themes of keywords.

This technique will also let you discover the various types of keywords that exist:

• Explicit keywords: Directly describe a product
• Problems keywords: Describes the conditions a product solves
• Symptoms keywords: Describes a problem
• Product names and part numbers: An actual product name and/or part numbers

I hope you enjoy Strike Keyword Gold By Writing A Simple Story.

Keyword Research & Refinement in 3 Easy Steps

December 16, 2009

I recently wrote an article for RSS Ray promoting the podcast I’ll be on later today called: Keyword Research & Refinement in 3 Easy Steps.

It’s looks a simplistic process for:

• Finding keywords
• Grouping keywords
• Refining keywords

While more advanced readers will want to user more tools and processes than outlined in this article; it’s an easy way to get started with your keyword research and refinement.

Full article on RSS Ray Blog: Keyword Research & Refinement in 3 Easy Steps.

Everything you need to know about Google’s SK Tool via Video Tutorials

October 5, 2009

Google launched the SK Tool (search based keyword tool) in November 2008. This tool uses Google’s crawler information and combines it with AdWords data to suggest keywords for your website. You can examine the results about any domain via the SK Tool. If you access the SK Tool while logged into a Google account that is associated with an AdWords account that buys traffic to a domain, then you can see some associated data points with the suggested keywords.

Google is excellent at making helpful videos about their products. What they aren’t great at is putting the videos in useful formats and marketing their own videos.  Some of these videos have under 300 total views, and most are under 1000. Considering how beneficial these videos are (and how many people conduct keyword research); those numbers should have a couple more 0s after it.

I’ve taken the videos that Google has produced and created some custom playlists so that you can view Google’s information is an easy-to-follow manner.

SK Tool Introduction & First Steps

This first playlists consists of 9 videos:

• Video 1: Product intro (3:49)
• Video 2: Getting started (4:06)
• Video 3: Navigating the interface (6:23)
• Video 4: Refining results (6:27)
• Video 5 & 6: Exporting the information (7:49)
• Video 7 – 9: Tracking the results (3:52)

It will take just over 30 minutes to watch all of the videos. However, as these videos do play in the correct order, you can leave and come back and jump to the next video you wish to view.

 

SK Tool Opportunities

The next playlist is a set of six short videos totaling around 15 minutes of ways to use the SK Tool to identify missed opportunities.

SK Tool – Other Videos

The last two videos are:

• Using the tool to promote new part of your website (2:22)
• Identifying how well your active keywords are doing (2:39)

More Google Videos

Google has quite a few channels and videos that they maintain. If you would like to see all of the official Google channels, you can view our subscription list or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Have You Tried WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool Yet?

September 24, 2009

Every time I talk to someone at WordStream, or read their blog, the more impressed I am with the people. There are some smart, and very curious people who are trying to solve some interesting issues around keywords. If you’re looking to streamline keyword expansion and gain some insight into your keywords (both SEO and PPC), it’s worth testing out their product.

They recently launched a free keyword tool. Here’s a demonstration video:

You can also follow WordStream on Twitter. Their main accounts are: http://twitter.com/quality_score and http://twitter.com/wordstream; however, there are quite a few other Twitters at the company.

The best part of this post? It’s not a paid review. I never take money for posts nor endorse anything that I don’t believe in. It’s a product that deserves some attention; and the entry point of free is pretty easy to test.

If you’d like to see more good videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel