When launching a brand new website in a competitive marketplace you have a lot of network effects working against you. Your competition has years of conversion data, an older trusted site, tons of content, and thousands of organic inbound links. Try to beat them right from the start for the most potent high-value keywords and you will likely fail.
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I hate to curse, but this tool is bad ass. Ad Intelligence is a new keyword tool from Microsoft which is well worth using, and will probably force Google and Yahoo to make better keyword tools. All of this data is free during the beta test as long as you have a Microsoft AdCenter account (you can set one up for $5, with a $50 coupon if you search Google for AdCenter) and a copy of Microsoft Excel 2007 (the Ad Intelligence link above allows you to download a free trial of Excel).
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I recently talked to the fine folks at Wordtracker about how unreliable the Yahoo! keyword suggestion was, and Wordtracker offered to work with me to power the SEO Book keyword tool using Wordtracker’s robust and reliable API.
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I took down my old Overture powered keyword tool and replaced it using Wordtracker data because:
I like Wordtracker’s data moreWordtracker’s API is much more reliable than scraping data from Overture the Overture tool seems like it has been down more often than it has been up recently
I primarily focus on the US market and did not realize how popular the international aspects of the old keyword research tool were until I started getting a rash of email complaints after taking the tool down.
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Should the MarketingSherpa’s guide to landing pages use an effective landing page? Should a company touting the value of statistics use statistically relevant datasets?
Every day someone is getting called out for being a liar, a thief, or a charlatan douchebag. You can’t track it all, but simply following your own guidelines and ideals lessens the odds that people will wrongfully call you out.
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Posted by randfish
For the last several years, we’ve had various implementations of Google’s “sitelinks” feature, the list of pages on a domain that usually appear when a branded or navigational query are performed in the engines. The latest updates to this visual display have brought a total of up to 8 internal links, plus a “more results from domain.com > Read the rest of this entry »
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Keyword Research TipsIf you have an old site you should use analytics to track what keywords you are getting traffic for. For most webmasters it is easier to rank for more related keywords than it is to discover and dominate new areas.
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Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.
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The Microsoft AdCenter blog posted that 35% of top search queries are brand related:
Approximately 35% of the top searches in the UK, USA and France are brand related, which gives you an idea just how brand focused our Live Search users are. If your brand is strong (and strong brands come in all shapes and sizes) include it in at least in one of your ad titles and try to get it in the descriptions too! We have often seen click through rates (CTRs) increase when brand names have been included effectively.
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Posted by randfish
Rather than trying to make this post go through all the tactics and specifics of Rebecca’s already comprehensive Keyword Research Guide, I figured I’d instead provide a solid list of every which way you can look at a keyword to get an idea of metrics, value and potential from the engines themselves (rather than services like AdWords, YSM, Wortracker or KW Discovery). This is more of an “expert” level post, as you’ll need to use these searches/tools yourself to figure out exactly how they apply to your business, but it’s stil valuable to have all of this collected in one place.
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