WordTracker Review - Part II

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Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

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WordTracker
The ultimate tool to:
Identify Keywords and Assess Online Market Competitiveness
http://www.wordtracker.com
= breakthrough tool
Online Service FREE Trial available

As pointed out in the previous issue of MasterMind
WordTracker is a uniquely useful tool to help marketers identify appropriate keywords and keyphrases to describe and promote their products/services online.

WordTracker actually allows you to measure the unique ratio between demand and supply of specific keywords and keyphrases providing a statistical and objective mean to identify effective terminology to bring relevant targeted customers to your Web site.

Mike Mindel of WordTracker has kindly and spontaneously contributed extra information updating and complementing what reported in the last issue:

He reported:

1) All references to 30 million searches should now be some 350 million searches from them major Metacrawlers Metacrawler (www.metacrawler.com) and Dogpile (www.dogpile.com).

2) Any references to calculating automatically how many visitors your web site will receive - it's actually how many people will look up your page listing, rather than how many will physically make it to your site. WordTracker can't predict that as it depends on quality of writing, catchy headings etc.

3) The results of Metacrawler/Dogpile is actually a real plus.
We knew Overture (formerly GoTo) was going to partner with all the search engines and so all the position checking, density analyzing, pay per bid monitoring robots were going to artificially inflate all their figures. By using Metacrawlers we eliminate this artifical robot skew. There is no Metacrawler of Metacrawlers and no need for robots to use them.

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Editor's Note: What Mike is saying here is that since Overture has recently partnered with some of the major search engines and directories providing them with results coming from its database, many of the tools utilized by search engine marketers to check for online demand of specific keywords/keyphrases would unfairly inflate apparent demand for those keywords/keyphrases.

This seems to be quite apparent if you use Overture free keyword suggestion tool accessible at: http://inventory.overture.com/d/ searchinventory/suggestion/

This is due to the fact that there exist many tools/softwares utilized by search engine marketers, which systematically query the major search engines and directories to check at which position your Web site is ranked and providing detailed information on competitors and ranking changes. All of this search engine marketing driven activity unjustly skews apparent demand for certain keywords making then appear much popular than they really are.

By utilizing the Metacrawler/Dogpile meta search engines WordTracker avoids falling into this trap, as those automatic software robots do not tap into metasearch engines databases for their results.

It may also be said, in my opinion, that while this is true, the Metacrawler/Dogpile combination makes no perfect statistical profiling of the all of the different types of users of search engines. That is, while WordTracker bases the value of its service on the assumption that the Metacrawler/Dogpile users are a small but statistically valid representative group of online search engine users, I have some reservations about this.

While the above may be true for general US-based marketing information geared to selling to US individuals it certainly does not apply to represent actual demand of international users in many other countries and may not well reflect the actual type of queries submitted by scientific, academic, and generally non-commercially oriented search engine users.

I have many doubts that among my readership for example there is an effective 1-3% userbase that utilizes Metacrawler/Dogpile to make its Internet searches. Though DogPile and Metacrawler do tap into many of the major search engines (but not on Google for example), I tend to believe that the people using these search tools are NOT fully representative of certain specific Internet users and their respective markets.

4) We also know that Metacrawler/Dogpile take up about 2.5-3% of the search engine queries and we capture *all* the data for the last 60 days so we can make some reasonably accurate predictions.

5) It is also now possible to directly input keyword combinations - you can now go to the projects menu and import a list of your own keywords and then run them against the engines.

WordTracker Review - Part II
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a) How to get WordTracker Top 500 keywords delivered weekly for free

b) WordTracker Free Trial

c) Full subscription features

In this issue of MasterMind, let me guide you with the help of volunteer contributor Pietro Carubbi, in finding out a little more about the WordTracker online service.

a) How to Get WordTracker Top 500 Keywords Delivered Weekly for Free

The WordTracker Web site lets you subscribe to the free weekly e-mail report of the top 500 frequently searched words on the Internet.
http://www.wordtracker.com/report.html

This report, completely free of charge, is delivered to subscribers via e-mail each Saturday and it is distributed to over 62000 webmasters.

Each week you can be updated on the 500 most requested keywords on the search engines.

Specifically, this is what I received in my latest report:

a) The top 300 queries from the last 24 hours, taken from the largest Metacrawlers on the Web (Metacrawler /Dogpile etc..)

b) The top 200 long term keyword report: A list of 200 keywords for the last 60 days (2 months) taken from the WordTracker database, whose size is currently 314,616,612 search terms.

c) Suggestions for interesting links, including tips on how to get the latest in search engine strategies and on how to put those keywords to work.

To subscribe to the Free WordTracker Top 500 keywords report go to:
http://www.wordtracker.com/report.html

 

b) WordTracker Free Trial

You can utilize the free WordTracker Trial as many times as you wish.
http://www.wordtracker.com/trial/

The main limitation of the Free Trial service is that you are querying only the AltaVista index, and have therefore a much smaller sample of data to work with.

The trial service is structured into four steps:

1) You enter a term that describes your business or service, after which WordTracker will find you as many related keywords as possible.

2) Find out the actual and predicted "demand" for these keywords.

3) E-mail, print or refine your keyword/keyphrase selection list.

4) Find out how many "suppliers" or Web sites are competing for your same keywords/keyphrases (limited to Altavista in the trial version).

You begin by inserting the keyword or phrase that best describes the product/service or know-how you are providing on a specific Web page.

With the lateral search WordTracker will find all possible synonyms of your keyword as utilized by search engine users on line. Actually, the lateral search is simply an automated brainstorming tool that brings back related/similar terms.

For this reason the trial recommends you to try to be as generic as possible to begin with, because you can narrow your search down later with more words, experimenting until you find what works best for you.

As you work through it you gradually develop a selected list of keywords which you can safely store in a special virtual basket.

Having a keyword list such the above one, you can then find out how popular these keywords actually are. That is, how many times these keywords have cropped up in the millions of queries collected by WordTracker.

This is a database of metacrawler queries compiled continually over the last two months. These include all the keywords (over 175 million per month) from metacrawler.com and dogpile.com.

A metacrawler is an engine that queries the main search engines like Altavista, Google, and Yahoo simultaneously. Every time a user queries one of these metacrawlers, WordTracker logs the search term that was used, the date and time of entry, and finally the count of times the term was entered over the period.

Next WordTracker attempts to calculate and the actual "demand" for a specific keyword/keyphrase by reporting two different values:

Count: The number of times each result has appeared in WordTracker's database in the last 2 months.

Predicted: The maximum total predicted traffic for all of the major search engines/pay per bids and directories. It is based on the current 24-hour period.

Finally, once on the basis of the above values you have selected your final set of keywords and keyphrases, you can utilize WordTracker to measure the actual supply, and demand- to-supply ratio (KEI) for each and everyone of those keyword combinations.

 

c) WordTracker Full Subscription Features

By subscribing to the WordTracker paid service you have full access to:

1) Search the database using your own keywords. The 15 related keywords of Step 1 may not give you enough useful information.
So you may add hundreds of your own keywords.

2) Two Top 1000 Reports Updated Once a Day:

- The top 1000 keywords from the last 2 months

- The most recent top 1000 keywords from the last 36 hours

Worth trying if you are serious about search engine marketing.

http://www.wordtracker.com

(Note that I have no stakes in the company, I do not resell its service, nor receive compensation of any kind for this review.)