Web Empire

Here is a closer look at some of the most popular websites with tools for keyword analysis that I found listed on Richard Lee’s blog. Just for the sake of analysis let’s pretend I’m looking for keywords relevant to dinosaurs. I’m not, but I used dinosaurs in an earlier example about selecting and expanding topics, so this would the next logical step in that process.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Simply type your keyword or keyword phrase into the form, fill in the captcha info on the next page, and you get two lists: Wordtracker and Overture.

How many times is this phrase searched for?

Wordtracker

Check out what else Wordtracker can do for you.

dinosaurs    2,656.0 /day

dinosaur    1,088.0 /day

walking with dinosaurs    334.0 /day

types of dinosaurs    193.0 /day

dinosaur jr    178.0 /day

dig for dinosaurs    172.0 /day

dinosaur pictures    167.0 /day

dinosaur names    164.0 /day

jurassic dinosaurs    145.0 /day

barney the dinosaur    119.0 /day

dinosaur coloring pages    118.0 /day

dinosaur bedding    109.0 /day

dinosaur porn    108.0 /day

dinosaur king    89.0 /day

walking with the dinosaurs    85.0 /day

Overture

No data for phrase: dinosaurs

Well, considering Yahoo bought out Overture.com five years ago, it looks like this tool has been around for a while without any updating. Overture’s search form is available on Yahoo, but only to those with a Yahoo advertising account. Since digitalpoint only gives Wordtracker results, why not just go to Wordtracker? But ‘dinosaur porn’??? Really?

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google has the captcha right on the keyword form, so just fill in the keyword and read the captcha, click the button and … for dinosaurs we got 150 related keywords, plus 45 ‘Additional keywords to consider.’ They don’t provide any exact numbers, but have little bars, partially colored-in to produce five settings, for each of three measurements: Advertiser Competition; Last Month’s Search Volume; and Average Search Volume. Each is ranked: very low, low, medium, high or very high. With almost 200 keywords or phrases and three graph bars for each I won’t copy that all here. Suffice to say it is a very useful and comprehensive list — except it didn’t show dino-porn. All the phrases in the main list contain the word dinosaur or dinosaurs, the second list has names of species, misspellings, etc.

http://www.iotaweb.org/

The keyword tools bills itself as:

Adsense/YPN Keyword Search

Enter any keyword to see a list of high-dollar-value AdSense keywords (and YPN!) which contain that word

Adsense PPC / CPC values for keywords: "Dinosaurs"

Your query found no results. Please try again.

I suppose they have a limited list of commonly sought words. So I try ‘internet business.’

Adsense PPC / CPC values for keywords: "Internet Business"

Your query found no results. Please try again.

Guess it’s not working.

http://www.keywordcountry.com/

Looking around the home page of this site for a while I found a link for a ’search preview’ so I tried that.

The top of the page has tabs for:

• High Paying Keywords
• Traffic Building Keywords
• Browse Keyword Map
• High CTR Keywords
• Niche Keywords

I entered dinosaurs in the box and left the tab to the default ‘High Paying Keywords’:

dinosaurs  ( 594 Matches found )
Definition : Any of the Mesozoic reptiles belonging to the groups designated as

ornithischians and saurischians.
Also Try : Dinosaur, Dinosaurs, dinos, DINOSAURS DINOSAURS

Keywords (Masked)    Cost per click    Clicks per
month    # of sponsors    Avg. CPC
1     xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx    $1.64    210    85
2     xxxxxxxx xxxxx    $0.91    120    39
3     xxxxxxxx xxxx    $0.79    300    53    0.27
4     xxxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxx    $1.37    90    69
5     xxxxxxxx xxx    $0.70    90    46    0.15
6     xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxx    $1.43    120    79
7     xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx    $0.47    60    36    0.16
8     xxxxxxxxx xxxx    $0.46    60    98    0.23
9     xxxxxxxx xxx xxxxxx    $2.97    30    84
10     xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx    $0.54    30    31
11     xxxxxxxx xx     $0.49    30        0.14

…

The list continues on, but you get the idea. Apparently, you have to pay to get results. There was another link on the home page that offered a free report and a form to fill in your keyword, name and email address. I tried that with a different keyword phrase that I really am interested in using. It returned zero results. I entered the same phrase in the google tool mentioned above, and got 14 results with the actual phrase (and variants) and 41 more related terms, about half of which were highly relevant.

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

This site has a simple form and captcha, so I entered dinosaur. Here are the first few results:

Results 1 - 100 of 21637

Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Search Term     Total Help
dinosaurs     113572
walking with dinosaurs     6244
cartoon dinosaurs     3435
pictures of dinosaurs     3080
jurassic park dinosaurs     2520
dinosaurs pictures     1944
marx dinosaurs     1723
list of dinosaurs     1450
dinosaurs tv show     1071
extreme dinosaurs     1067
cute dinosaurs     1017

Over 21,000 results? Well, not for free:

The free Keyword Discovery tool is limited to 100 results only. You can view and export up to 10,000 results if you subscribe to Keyword Discovery.

Sounds like a great way to find long, long, long-tail terms, if that is what you are after. Costs $70 a month with discounted annual rate. None of the first 100 results had dinosaur — they all had the plural form, as I typed it.

http://www.keywordspy.com/

This site offers to ‘Find which keywords your competitors are using’ I typed in our keyword and got back three results under the tab ‘Paid Keywords’ — with the note at bottom:

You are viewing only 10 results out of 3

Each of the three listed as website name and a ‘Number of Keywords’ field, ranging from LearnAboutDinosaurs.com 122; to Yahoo.com 262,696. Click on the website and it gives the first ten keywords, with ROI, position, competitors, clicks/day and price/click.

The second tab has ‘Organic Keywords’ and had ten sites listed, beginning with images.google.com 1,046,001. For some reason EnchantedLearning.com was listed twice with the same numbers. Clicking on the link gives the first ten keywords, position and search result counts.

Under the tab ‘Affiliate Links’:

Your search for "dinosaurs" did not generate any results.

And the tab labeled ‘Time Machine’ give a seven-month graph of the popularity of the search term. It also lists five competitor sites. Click on the site name and it shows a graph of the number of keywords for that site for the past seven months, and lists the keywords with PPC, Adrank and Number of Competitors.

You can get quite a bit of info on the most popular terms using this site, but for full information you need to shell out the $90 a month for a subscription.

http://www.kwmap.net/

Minimalist landing page just has a search box and the line: ‘A Keyword Map for the Whole Internet’. Enter our term and we get a graphic display of related terms, each linked to a search for that term as keyword; a list of related websites; and a list of related keywords:

Alphabetical keyword list:
# ammonites
# australian dinosaurs
# biggest dinosaurs
# birds
# books about dinosaurs
# children
# creation
# dinosaur
# dinosaurs for kids
# dinosaurs fossils
# evolution
# fossil
# fossils
# games
# geology
# inflatable dinosaurs
# jurassic
# jurassic dinosaurs
# kids
# lost world
# museum
# natural history
# paleontology
# pictures of dinosaurs
# science
# snakes n dinosaurs
# t-rex
# the magic school bus dinosaurs
# toy dinosaurs
# toys
# trilobites
# truth about dinosaurs
# tyrannosaurus
# walking with dinosaurs
# walking with dinosaurs dvd
# why dinosaurs went extinct
# wight dinosaurs
# wooden dinosaurs
# working with dinosaurs
# world of dinosaurs
# worlds fair dinosaurs

The graphic only shows about 18 keywords, while the list has about 40. An excellent site for branching out into related terms. This doesn’t appear to be a commercial site, (at least it hasn’t been monetized yet) and there is a form to add your website and keywords.

http://adlab.msn.com/ForecastV2/

Crazy stuff. This site asks you enter your keywords in search box, then shows a graph of the frequency of search for each term, with an eleven month history and four month ‘prediction’ — I’m not sure if the labels are just wrong, or if the time period covered is a year old, since the graph goes from April 2006 to June 2007, with the April-June 2007 ‘predicted.’

Under that are two bar graphs, showing the age and sex of persons searching the term. Who would have thought that more than 60% of dinosaur searchers are over 50 and over 60% are women? Somehow I doubt it, but then what can we expect from MSN?

http://www.nichebot.com/

This is one of those sites with thousands of links that all seem to lead to sales pages. I think you have to join before you can use it.

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

This site says it is powered by Wordtracker. It gives a nice long list of keyword phrases, then the count of searches in WordTracker, and estimates for Google, Yahoo, MSN and and Overall Daily Estimate. All this can be conveniently exported to a csv file. Then there are eight more columns that are links to other sites with the keyword as a search term, including Yahoo Suggest, Keword Discovery, Google Trends, Google Traffic, Google Suggest, etc. Also, the number counts are linked to the respective sites, and return search results for the associated keywords. Very convenient and useful information.

http://seodigger.com/

For this site you enter your website into the search bar, it searches its database, and tells you how many keywords you rank in the top 20 for on Google. Only works if you website is in their database — i.e. the search terms in their database are ones you rank in the top 20 for — so it isn’t really very useful. You should know what terms you rank well for already. A premium version is available for a fee.

http://spyfoo.com/

This is another site that tells you what keywords your competitors are using. You can enter either a keyword or website domain in the search box. For dinosaurs it returned three advertisers, and stats showing cost per click $0.22-$0.45; 620 to 785 searches per day. Click on a website in the results and it gives more stats specific to that site, lists organic and advertised keywords and competitors. Not all of the keywords seemed relevant.

http://wordtracker.com/
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

If you go to the main URL you can get a seven day free trial by signing up, after which subscription is required. Using the freekeywords sub-domain you can search a term, get the number of searches for each:

dinosaurs
13,748 searches (top 100 only)
Searches    Keyword
13,748    total searches
4215    dinosaurs
1726    dinosaur
530    walking with dinosaurs
306    types of dinosaurs
282    dinosaur jr
273    dig for dinosaurs
265    dinosaur pictures
260    dinosaur names
230    jurassic dinosaurs
188    barney the dinosaur
187    dinosaur coloring pages
173    dinosaur bedding
171    dinosaur porn
141    dinosaur king
134    walking with the dinosaurs
133    walk the dinosaur
130    dinosaur fossils
128    dinosaur facts
115    dinosaurs extinction
112    barney the purple dinosaur

The complete list has 100 related keywords, these are just the first 20. As you can see they match the digitalpoint.com results for the first 15 terms, but for some reason the numbers are different, higher here than on that site. The seobook.com site has the full list of 100 keywords, but their numbers are the same as those on digitalpoint. Sites ‘powered by WordTracker’ must be contractually obligated to use aged data.

http://www.wordze.com/

This is a subscription site, I don’t see any free search tool listed. It costs $8 for a one-day trial, or $40 per month.

So there you go, our longest (and greatest, I modestly say) post ever, all you ever wanted to know about online keyword search sites and tools. I suggest Google and SEOBook, but explore some of the others if you have the time.

OK, you asked for it. Well, no you really didn’t — more like you failed to ask for anything. So I’m forced to up the stakes. I’m not getting enough sign-ups for my newsletter, so for the next six months (May 2008 through October 2008) I’m giving away a free database each month for all subscribers.

Now of course these are not going to be my premium database products, I need to sell those … these are databases that you can find online if you search deep enough and long enough. But you won’t need to search at all — by subscribing I’ll give you a direct link that you can use, no charges, no further up-sell, nothing except you need to subscribe to my newsletter, which will tell you of new premium databases as they become available.

Our first free database will be the first-names database, over 28,000 first names, their origins and meaning. I know, lots of you may already have this — but I also know only a small minority have noticed that over 8000 names have a tab character preceding and following the name entry in the original database. I have deleted those from our version of course, because they prevent ‘exact match’ queries, which is what most people would use for a first-name (or baby-name) query.

I looked at some of the names that had the tabs, and searched them on Google. Results returned were as low as 300-and-some matches. Names that didn’t have the tabs always return about 500,000 matches. Obviously, most people with baby-name or first-name websites have never noticed this problem with the database. You can have a database without that problem simply by subscribing to my newsletter (put your email in the box at upper right). If you have an existing baby-name or first-name meanings site with fewer than 28,000 names returned on query, I’d suggest you replace your database with this one.

If you don’t have a first-name or baby-name site, I don’t suggest you start one with this database, though you could. Much better, would be to use this database to enhance a site that focuses on other information. Maybe a biographical site, with each first-name linked to a pop-up that gives the meaning and origin for those names. Use your imagination.

No publicly available database should be the basis for an entire site! Use commercial databases to enhance sites you build around your own private database, to create ‘value added’ sites that will attract loyal visitors.

Added two new databases to our Web Content Center, one is a list of towns, cities and communities with their postal codes, the other is a sub-set of that with just the names of localities, the civil administration municipality and state they are found in. The postal code database has 44,947 records, while the locality database has 41,417 records. There are fewer locality records because some of the postal code records are for Universities, government organizations, etc.

The postal code database is $48 — (discounted to $24 for the first 30 days), and the locality sub-set is just $18 (or $9 at discount for the first 30 days). I have seen only one other source for the Mexican postal codes, and somehow they have 14,000 more records than I do, but I can not explain why. So far as I can tell, my database is complete — if anyone knows where they came up with those extra records, let me know! They also include longitude/latitude with their data, which is not available with mine. But then, they charge $350 for their database — more than seven times my base price, or 14 times the discount price.

I have zip code and locality information for the U.S. as well, and will add those databases soon. I also have some genealogical and biographical data that will be added. Put your email address in the yellow box at upper left to get notifications when new databases become available — remember, get them in the first 30 days for half-price!

Over on Blue Hat SEO an interesting little drama has been playing out that caught my attention. Now let me say from the start that that site recommends both black-hat and white-hat solutions to Search Engine Optimization problems — hence the name I guess. Recently the host posted a guest commentary on ‘captcha breaking’.

Captcha refers to those little graphics with crooked letters in shades of gray or other OCR unfriendly styles, that are intended to ensure that only ‘real people’ enter data (such as registration details), rather than automated scripts. The guest post gave a long, complicated programming technique for converting these graphics into something an OCR program can read with fair reliability, thus allowing black-hat hackers to overcome this obstacle.

Now I have no use for breaking captcha’s, that just doesn’t fit with my style. But I was delighted by the subsequent post by the host of that site, where he gave his own technique for breaking captchas, just because the solution was so simple and elegant — the kind of concept that can be applied to other problems.

Instead of writing a complicated program in C and implementing various steps and procedures, his solution was to use a website that was already part of his web-empire. With a simple little PHP script, he simply displays the captcha he wants to ‘break’ on his own site, as a log-in requirement or in order to use some feature, just as if it were a typical captcha situation. Only he records the result from the user’s response, and feeds that back to the program that needs to know what the captcha says. So long as his site where he displays the captcha gets plenty of traffic, the response will be fast enough to use the results immediately. Such urgency is not inherent to the technique, but applies to this captcha example only.

This is a wonderful example of using a social engineering approach to solve a problem. I’m sure it can be applied (or modified) to many other situations where there is no programmatic substitute for human intelligence. There are sites that use similar techniques to identify the content in photographs, or distinguish galaxies from stars in high-resolution telescope images. How could you use this technique in building your web-empire?

NOTE: if the link to bluehatseo.com does not work, it is because the site is currently under various hack-attacks, supposedly because someone took exception to his revealing ’secrets’ about captcha-hacking. That is the drama part of this story I referred to at the beginning. Most hackers endorse the concept that information should be free, but apparently some harbor IBM style business concepts.

Well this is my 48th post on this blog, and I bet you’ve been wondering when I would begin to monetize things. There were 47 posts without a single ad, affiliate link, or promotion … surely you knew the other shoe had to drop! I’ve made it clear that I’m in this business to make money … like you. I think my best bet (for this blog at least) is to help you make money by enriching your website content. So yes, I’m selling data.

I have lots of ideas and data already available, and plans to acquire more. Today, however, I added my first database to my Web Content site: a list of  13,000 news headlines from the last quarter of 2007. That database is just $7 for the first 30 days, half the regular price. I have plans to automate the sale and delivery using PayPal’s IPN, but have not yet actually written the code, so if you buy in the next few days the sale will be hand-processed and may take a while — that will be corrected as soon as I get the time to write code to handle it.

As with any database, I implore you not to use this information in bulk without either selection or modification. That is a sure road to duplicate content problems. You are not the only one with this data, so use it creatively. Select parts of the database, using keyword searches or other criteria, and use only those fields that will benefit the SEO characteristics of your site.

This blog is about Web Empire’s of course, so I assume you have, or will have, more sites. Use the same database in different ways on different sites. Select different data, use different fields, randomize the order — or sort on different values — to achieve unique results. Follow the link to the site, above, for an example of just one potential usage for some of this data.