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Keyword
Selection is fundamental to Search Engine marketing. Get the wrong keywords, your
online business is doomed to fail. Find the right keywords, and you will drive
masses of targeted traffic to your website via the Search Engines. There
have been discussions in webmasters forums why are the search query results of
Overture so much different than those of Wordtracker? For example at the time
of this writing a search query for the key phrase internet marketing yielded 342,
848 searches for the last 60 days by Overture, and 2, 356 by Wordtracker. Now,
which is more accurate? Overture
It is a
Pay Per Click Search Engine. According to Overture, its statistics of searches
in previous months are compiled from its partners, which include AltaVista, Yahoo,
MSN Search, HotBot and All the Web. So the statistics from Overture are broad
based because it has a larger network. Its
data, though, has some drawbacks. 1.
Theres no distinction between... a.
Singular and plural terms. You
have to figure if surfers are searching for the singular or plural form of the
keyword. b.
Upper and lower case. c.
Human queries and automated queries. Queries
by automated bid optimizers, position and ranking monitors, link popularity analyzers
are registered as hits. 2.
Duplicate Searches For
example a person doing a search for a particular key phrase in Yahoo, and then
in MSN would be registered as 2 hits. Wordtracker
It is a
keyword generator and analyzer, and it does not have direct access to the major
Search Engines databases. Wordtracker gets a lot of its analyzer data from Meta-crawler
and Dogpile, which are meta search engines. Metacrawler and Dogpile search the
major Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask Jeeves, and retrieve
the best results. The
data of Wordtracker, mostly gathered from Metacrawler and Dogpile, represents
only a small percentage of total searches on the Internet. Wordtracker
has about 350 million searches over an 8-week rolling cycle (Source: Search Engine
Workshops Weblog, June 30, 2005). Now for some Maths. 350 million searches over
56 days would give an average of 6.25 million searches per day. Google with a
share of 36 per cent of Internet traffic (Source: comScore qSearch, July 2005),
registers about 112 million of searches per day (Source: Top Ten list, Wordtracker).
So in comparison to total searches on the Internet Wordtracker represents only
2 per cent. When
Wordtracker returns zero query for a particular search phrase, it does not mean
that no one searches for it on the Internet. However,
with Wordtracker, automated queries are not added to searches, and duplicate searches
are eliminated. Singular and plural, upper case and lower case search terms are
distinguished except for keywords where singular, plural, lower or upper case,
are similiar in meanings eg.keyword and keywords. Overture
or Wordtracker? For
Overture the figures are inflated, whilst for Wordtracker they are under reported.
Nonetheless, these are helpful tools for keyword research and selection. Use these
figures as guides, and not absolutes to make comparisons in your choice of keywords.
For example
if key phrase 1 has 10,000 searches in Overture, and key phrase 2 has 2000 searches,
then it is obvious that key phrase 1 would bring in more traffic if your web page
is properly optimized. But dont expect 10,000 visitors with key phrase 1. I
have read on Webmasters forums of people who had selected keywords based on the
promising number of searches on Overture, optimized their web page, and achieved
within the top 10 positions of major Search Engines, yet saw very little traffic.
In my opinion,
if you are comparing popularity between keywords or key phrases, Overture will
do the job. If you are selecting keywords or key phrases to start an online business,
or advertising on Pay Per Click engines, conventional wisdom would tell you Wordtracker
is a better bet. It is better to set lower expectations based on lower figures,
and be pleasantly surprised when things turned out otherwise.
Gerrick W - mailto:gw@1stinternetmarketingsolution.com
Information and Software Tools You Need to Effectively Promote Your Online Business.
Visit: http://www.1stinternetmarketingsolution.com
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