Some other Keyword Research Tools

Some other Keyword Research Tools

One need to choose those keywords that are frequently searched for and which is in high demand, but not being already used by many other websites and competitors, and thus has low competition. There are a number of keyword research tools that can help you find them.

Apart from the Wordtracker which was already discussed in an other article, we have some more equally important research tools like the Overture, Google AdWords Keyword and Guidebeam.

Overture's http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works more like the Wordtracker but doesn't tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase. For example if you type ‘Computer’, the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the word ‘Computer’ was searched, say for example 459550 times at Overture.Com. Similarly 'computer game' was searched 302210 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combinations of that word, which are based on actual searches done by people. If the word you keyed in is not a common search term then you will not get any results. It means that very few people have actually searched for that word during the last month.

Even Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Features of this tool include,
Sorting the results of your desired keyword search by popularity, past performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position.
Easy keyword manipulation where you can select a few keywords here and there or add them all at once.
Searches for keywords present even in any webpage URL specified by your search. It can also expand your keyword search even further to include those pages that are linked to or from the original URL page.
More keyword results are generated based on regularly updated usage statistics database. This helps you to get new keywords or phrases.

Guidebeam http://www.guidebeam.com/ is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers generated against each phrase are Guidebeam's estimation of how relevant that phrase is.

These softwares are useful for researching how people search the web and then optimizing your own web pages so that more people find your web site.


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Must Have Features Your Web Site

Must Have Features Your Web Site

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.


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Keyword Density

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:
Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.


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How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.


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Unlocking The Niche Code - Part 6

This is where I go to niche-specific sites.

So I’ll set up a mini-course on my autoresponder with my content.

I like mini-courses better than just a free report to get them to opt in, because the free report is a one shot deal. I want to “train” them to be on the lookout for my emails, to anticipate them and open them. That way when (or if) my offer shows up in their inbox, it may have only been a day or two since they last heard from me, not weeks or months ago when they got their free report (in that case they’ll likely forget they signed up for your list and promptly delete your offer, unsubscribe, or report it as spam).

If I have a free report I want to use, I’ll simply break it up for my mini-course. But as this is a new niche, it’s unlikely I’ll have a report yet.

I’ll then set up some very targeted PPC ads using Adwords.

I want to match each ad group to the keywords as closely as possible.

Then I turn it all on and start building my list.

So where’s the product, you ask?

Well, at this point, I don’t know for certain how much traffic I’ll get or whether they’ll opt in or not, never mind whether they will purchase my product. I have an idea, due to my research.

But now we want hard numbers to back it all up before I invest any more of my time and money. Hence, the testing.




There are two things I primarily watch as the list begins to build:

How much traffic I am getting from PPC. I want to compare what I’m getting with my previous Overture estimates (adjusted for Google). At this point I want real numbers, not estimates.

My opt in percentage. If it’s too low, either my squeeze page copy needs to be tweaked, or, if I’ve done my homework with my copy, perhaps this market is not made up of enough buyers.

Listen, if they’re not going to opt in, they’re certainly not going to buy.

Now if my traffic and opt ins are both good, now is the time to start thinking about a product, which ideally should be along the same lines as the content they signed up for in the first place.

Sometimes I will even email my list at this point and simply ask them what they want, or try to determine their wants and needs from carefully constructed survey questions. Just remember that people often say one thing and do another. It’s only 100% accurate when they vote with their wallets.

An even better way to test your list’s desire for a particular piece of information is to announce a free teleseminar to them, then see how many show up. If a large percentage of your list calls in, it’s a good bet they’re interested in your call topic.

HINT: Teleseminars also make GREAT products or bonuses themselves if you record them and sell them after the fact. In fact, sometimes I’ll announce a paid teleseminar rather than a free one.

Why?

Because then I know people will pay money for that information, an even better test indicator. They are voting with their wallets. Plus I can always sell the call recording after the fact as well.

Another technique to test whether this niche is built up of buyers or tire-kickers and freebie seekers is to promote an affiliate product within that niche.

If the product content is similar in nature to what you want to create as your product, it’s a good indication that you have the potential to get a similar percentage to buy yours. Just make sure it’s either a non-competing product or a front-end sale. If it’s a front-end sale, you’ll develop a mid or back-end product.

Bear in mind that in the case of the latter, you’ll get less of a percentage to buy (compared with the percentage who bought your affiliate front-end product), but you may make up the difference and then some with a higher ticket item. It’s a risk, but it should be a calculated one.

The beautiful thing is, once I confirm a niche will be profitable, with this approach I already have a pre-built list that keeps getting bigger by the time I launch the product.

So there you have it.

There are plenty of sites I use for research in addition to the ones above, but they are usually niche specific. These sites will help you to research practically any niche market effectively. Once you have this process down, you’ll be able to do this very quickly.

After all time is money.


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Unlocking The Niche Code - Part 5

The work is already done for you. You just need to put it to good use. As you can see above, piano is too broad a niche. It has a high amount of searches, but the bids for PPC traffic is too low. As a result, I would suspect that people are generally not making a lot of money with that search term.

Remember, high volume + low PPC bids = low click through rates and even lower conversions.

Fly fishing, on the other hand, does have PPC bids between 30 cents and $2.00, so money is likely being made there. However, the search term itself is too low. Unless you have other keywords for that niche to add additional traffic, I would steer clear from there as well.

There are several other sites I use as well to get niche ideas, and especially to narrow the niche and discover potential information the market wants:



Nichebot - http://www.nichebot.com

Shopping.com Top Searches –
http://www2.shopping.com/top_searches

AOL Hot Searches - http://hot.aol.com/hot/hot

Google Groups - http://groups.google.com

Craig's List - http://www.craigslist.com

Delicious Popular - http://del.icio.us/popular

Dig - http://www.digg.com

Google Catalogs - http://catalogs.google.com

Google Suggest –
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Technorati - http://www.technorati.com


Also, I'll do several targeted searches in both Google and Yahoo (for example, on the subject of "hobbies").

Finally, I’ll see what existing digital products are being sold in my target niche at the Clickbank Marketplace

(http://marketplace.clickbank.net).

HINT: If you want to see how your competitor’s sale pages have evolved over time, the Wayback Machine is a great place to do so (http://www.archive.org).

And of course I will always Google my keywords and check out the competition in the Adwords ads. In this case I pay special attention to the ads that sell information products (or services like mine if I’m selling a service).

Some of the ads will be irrelevant as far as competition goes.

Ok, the next thing I'll do is check how many magazines there are on the subject of my chosen niche.

There are two places I go online for that:

Magazines.com - http://www.magazines.com

and

Amazon –
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/599858/

At each site, I search by category to find the magazines in my niche.

Obviously the more the better, up to a point.

For example, golf has a lot of magazines, but it's not a good niche by itself. It needs to be more targeted. But in that case I can always get more targeted sub-niche ideas within that topic by looking at the types of magazines for that topic.

Now, as good as these sites are for finding magazines, I'm still going to need to go to a bookstore that carries lots of magazines and browse through the ones in my niche?

Why?

Because I want to see what kinds of ads are in them.

I need to know who else is selling what, and it will also tell me whether the people in this niche spend money. And the ads will not only tell me that, but they will also tell me what the people in this niche spend their money ON. And if I want to know which ads keep appearing (because then I'll know they are making money), I would want to pick up several issues in a row of the same magazine, if possible.

Ok. By now I should have a pretty good niche market to test. And by knowing what kinds of informational products are selling, I can start to formulate the content I’m going to use for my test.


to be continued.....



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Unlocking The Niche Code - Part 4

Again, at this point I’m just trying to get a snapshot or pulse of this market.

Plus, the bid process also tells you a little about the moneymaking opportunities of a market. As a loose rule, if the max bid results are between 30 cents and $2.00, it’s a good indicator that people are making money in this market. I call this my “magic window.”

Over $2.00 means that the competition is too fierce for my tastes, but depending on your market and eventual product selling price and demand, it may make sense for you.

To check on the companies that are bidding on my keywords in Google Adwords, I use http://www.googspy.com.
One relative newcomer as a research tool is Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends).



There’s lots of useful information here. You can see that the news volume is synced with the search volume, and several notable news articles are displayed, along with where they occurred on the timeline.

In the lower section, you can see which countries, cities, and languages made the most searches. Be aware that the indicators are normalized, meaning they are adjusted for that region’s population. For example, South Africa has about 44 million people, compared with the U.S.’s 295 million. So the U.S. may have performed more actual searches, but after the adjustment is made, South Africa comes on top for this search term, which is “fly fishing.”

In the upper-right corner of the page, you can switch regions (e.g. if you wanted to check the U.S. only), and you can change the time period.

For example, notice below how I changed the time period to a single month. See any cyclic trends there?



You may have noticed that searches for this topic tend to spike every Friday, going into the weekend, and then fall again during the week.

This information may be useful if you are going to advertise with Google Adwords, and you’re launching a firesale or other limited time campaign, because you’ll want to schedule your campaign around one or more of those spikes.

Some markets have different patterns, so it’s useful to be aware of them prior to launch.

Another great use for Google Trends is if you are trying to decide between two different niches. If you enter your search terms and separate two or more with a comma, Google will compare them for you.


to be continued....



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Unlocking The Niche Code - Part 3

Time to scope it out a little further.

We want to be as certain as we possibly can that our niche is focused enough but big enough, and that the people in that niche spend money.

So next I head over to the Overture Resource Center (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch) and click on the “Keyword Selector Tool.”

Then I enter my niche and see how many times that keyword and all related keywords were searched in the previous month.



I like to see at least 10,000 searches for all keywords combined, but not more than, say, 50,000 or so (although I do have profitable niches that have only a few thousand searches at Overture, but they are the exception rather than the rule).

For “latch rug”, you can see that this market is just too small.

Remember that Overture searches are for Yahoo and their partner sites, so to measure the number of searches on Google, I usually estimate between 5 and 10 times this number to come up with Google’s searches. Also, depending on the market, I've sometimes found Overture’s figures somewhat inflated, so bear in mind that the number of actual searches might be lower.

If I’m happy with the number of searches for this potential niche, I next want to see how much pay per clicks (PPC) are going to cost me on Google Adwords.

For that I use Overture’s “View Bids Tool.”


I want to make sure I won’t have to pay more than a dollar or two per click on average, but of course what you can profitably pay for PPC will depend on your product’s selling price and how many you can sell.


to be continued....


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Unlocking The Niche Code - Part 2

The eBay Pulse site is a great place to start looking at sub-niches. What I will do is select the category first (using the topics I’ve gathered from looking at the previous sites), then look for profitable sub-niches by then selecting a sub-category.
The best chance for success is if I am as specific as possible with my niche selection. In the example below, I don’t want to sell to the “crafts” niche.
I want to sell to grandmothers who enjoy giving their latch rug hooking gifts to their families and friends. Whatever. You get the idea.





Also, I’ll always check the largest stores as well to see what they’re selling. There has to be a reason they are the largest stores. They must be doing something right.

eBay also puts out a PDF report of their hottest categories each month, available at
http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf.


Now that I have some potential sub-niches to work with, I want to see how much of a market there is there.

Just because a sub-niche is popular doesn’t mean people spend money on it.
Amazon - http://www.amazon.com

Amazon is a great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche.

Chances are, the more books there are written on that subject, the more that market spends on those topics.


For example:



First I specify “Books” to search. Then I enter my niche, in this case “crafts.”

Uh oh. There are WAY too many books returned. This niche is not targeted enough. It is too “mainstream.”



Much better! There are possibilities here.

We now suspect the following:

This sub-niche may be targeted enough.

This sub-niche may spend money.



to be continued .....


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Unlocking The Niche Code - Part 1

When selling a product, a lot of people make the mistake of developing their product first, and then trying to find a market for it. Of course, the process should be reversed.

Find a market first that spends money, then find out what they want and give it to them.

It is certainly easier said than done, but there are a lot of places online where you can do your market research for free. They've done most of the work for you already. You just need to know where to go and what to do to connect all the dots.

Let me show you the process I go through when I'm trying to brainstorm for ideas.

For starters, I'm always aware of trends and current events in the real world. I read several newspapers each day, many magazines, both general and niche-specific, I watch the news, I listen to the radio. Occasionally something that I hear or read will stick with me. I may record my thoughts on my portable voice recorder; jot down some notes, whatever happens to be convenient for me. Sometimes I'll call my office voice mail and leave myself a message.

But at some point I'll have several broad ideas to research. I want to look deeper. And I want to make sure there is a good market for them before I even think about creating a product.

So I'll begin completing the following steps:


Google Zeitgeist-
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

To begin with, I check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist. If I am targeting the US market, I’ll click on “U.S. Zeitgeist,” otherwise I’ll look at “Zeitgeist Around the World.” At this point I am just looking for ideas.

If I see that a particular topic is hot, I’ll make a note of it and look at more targeted sub-niches later on at more specialized sites.


Lycos Top 50 - http://50.lycos.com

The Lycos Top 50 is another site, like Google Zeitgeist, where I will review the latest trends and look for hot topics to explore further. I will also look at Yahoo! Buzz for ideas as well (see below).

Yahoo! Buzz - http://buzz.yahoo.com


eBay Pulse – http://pulse.ebay.com


to be continued....



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