Keyword Research – How to find related terms easily

Keyword research is the A & B of Pay Per Click marketing and search engine optimization. Often we just grab the main keyword, dump it into the keyword research tools and hope to find the golden nugget that will make us rich. That can work, but is not always the best approach because every other marketer is doing exactly the same and therefore the competition is stiff and high rankings are difficult to achieve or very expensive to maintain. There is a neat little trick, that most people are not aware of. This trick allows you to dump in your main search term and the Google search results will show the main related terms in bold text. By seeing the related terms in bold text we can then grab those and create new and better keyword combinations for our research and ultimately build keyword lists for PPC that are cheap to bid on, but still bring in high traffic. Of course the same works for SEO as it allows us fill our content with more related keywords and therefore rank for those as well.

So, how does this little trick work? Identify a couple of main keywords for your niche you are working on. The go to Google.com and search for those keywords, but put the little “~” symbol in front of the main keyword. Your search term would then be entered like this: ~hosting

This screenshot shows you the results for the search on `hosting. I marked the search term up on top and then highlighted the keywords Google marked in bold because it sees an immediate, primary relationship with the main search term. Now the search for hosting is pretty broad and generic, but do the same with something more detailed and you might find great ideas for your keyword research.

Advanced Keyword Tracking

I am fed up with how limited I am with some of the tools I am using to improve my business. As an example for web statistics I am using AWStats. AWStats is great. it gives me a lot of useful information, but that is actually not enough. It tracks all the keywords people use to find my websites, but it does not associate the keyword with the actual landing page. This is a manual process for me where I have to grab the keyword, find out which search engine is ranking me for the keyword and what the URL/Page is it is sending the visitor to. Why is that information important? Well, it allows you to better target the arriving visitor and to provide for a better experience. Experience? Yes, a) you can optimize the page the visitor will arrive on to provide even more related information (=better experience) and b) it allows you to offer extremely targeted advertising of products and services (=better experience).

So, the last few days I have been pulling my hair out brushing up on my PHP/MySQL skills and were able to create a small snippet of code that does exactly what I described above. The PHP code is now embedded into one of my websites for testing and it writes the data I am collecting into a MySQL database. From there I am pulling the data, clean it up, and then use it to my advantage. The PHP code tracks where the visitor comes from, which keyword/phrase she was using, and what page the user landed on. Here is a (cleaned up) example of the final result (I pulled out the source from this image as it is secondary for now). The image shows the search term the visitor was using and the URL/page of mine where the visitor arrived on.

I can now go and review those pages and optimize them. I can update outdated information and target the update towards the search the page is ranking for. I can add extremely targeted advertising as well as I can add highly visible links to other pages with related information and therefore keep the visitor longer on my website. The good thing with the script I wrote – it also tracks the IP address and time stamp of the visitor and so I can track where she went next and when they finally leave my website. I can also track how long the visitor stays on my website up to a certain degree. There are a couple more benefits and things I can do now.

I still need to improve the script to get all the information I want into a useful format, but for now I am mainly concentrating on keywords and landing pages. Eventually I am considering to make the code public so that others can jump in and improve the code since I am not a good developer. My coding knowledge is very limited and this is already way beyond of what I usually do.

The script also works well in PPC landing pages. A) I can now verify which keyword the visitor arrived on and b) dynamically include content and keywords on the PPC landing page to provide a better experience for the visitor and that way increase my sales or referrals. That is still another big piece I have to work on. So much ideas, so much work, not enough time when you are still having a full-time job + family. So, patience is still a skill I have to have, but I am getting there …..

PS: If you have some PHP knowledge and would like to get involved and help me to optimize the code, I am interested to hear from you. You would get a good head start on the keyword tracking script and so we both can benefit from it. Please leave a comment.

Stop SPAMMERS with captcha

Almost all my websites point to a domain of mine where I host a helpdesk software. This is used instead of maintaining several “contact us” forms. This is a great way to streamline your communications and makes it easy for customers as well. The helpdesk is hosted on a domain name referencing my business name and therefore works for all my websites and I do not need to customize it. I am using Intellodesjk as my helpdesk software. It was up to date when I bought it, but development has stalled since then and the software has a bug. This bug allows tickets to be submitted without being registered. Of course spammers figured that out and I am getting 10+ tickets a day filled with porn SPAM. Intellodesk is encoded software and so I cannot make any changes to it. I submitted a ticket to the maker and they offered to install captcha image verification for me, but that was the last thing I heard. No response and no action from them. Since I am not ready to spend $300 on Kayako (my next choice) eSupport Software I am kinda stuck.

So, I came up with a small (inconvenient) workaround. I moved the helpdesk to a different directory and installed a new page in the root directory. From there the visitor is asked to enter a captcha security code and then continue. If the code input fails I am logging the IP addresses of the visitors and will then enter them into my .htaccess files. If they succeed entering the code they can access the helpdesk and open a ticket. I figured if somebody really wants to contact me, the will have no problems completing this initial step – even though it is inconvenient.I also updated my robots.txt file to exclude the entire site from being spidered. Since this is my helpdesk I don’t need it in Google or Yahoo. I know this is not perfect, but for the time being the best thing in my opinion.

This also gave me the opportunity to refresh some of my PHP knowledge. I used a pre-existing script for the captcha and then modded it to do the extra IP address logging. Now IP addresses are dynamically inserted into the .htaccess file and spammers are banned. I am using session based information and upon 3rd try the IP address goes into the .htaccess. The code snippet to dynamically update an .htaccess file looks like this:

<?PHP

$ip = getenv(’REMOTE_ADDR’);
$handle = fopen(”../.htaccess”, “a”);
fwrite($handle, “Deny from $ip\n”);
fclose($handle);
echo “The IP Address $ip has banned from this domain due to SPAM.”;
mail(”you@example.com”, “Banned IP”, “Deny from $i”);
?>

You can use this code for many other pieces and that makes it so interesting. Grab the referrer information for keyword or website that brought the visitor to your website and do something with it. Normal web statistic programs like AWStats do a good job, but it just does not tell you which keyword lead the visitor to which webpage of yours. You would need to do a lot of digging yourself to check search engines and rankings to gather that information. Now instead of piping that information into an email (like the example above does), dump it into a database or text file. We are going to use the HTTP_REFERRER variable for this. What is HTTP_REFERRER?

‘HTTP_REFERER’ = The address of the page (if any) which referred the user agent to the current page.

The following code snippet would display the keyword the user came of from Google in your PHP-based web page. Replace the “echo” line with what ever you want to do with the information (email, database, etc.). Register_Globals needs to be enabled on your server for this to work.

if(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], “google.com/search”) !== false) {
$keyword = array_pop(explode(”&q=”, $referer));
echo(htmlentities(urldecode($keyword)));
}

Have fun getting better keyword information from your website.

Adwords Tycoons … rip off again?

A few months ago I wrote the first time about Adwords Tycoons. I was flooded with email how fast the Google Adwords related product would be selling, but it turned out to be just marketing hype and hot air. It turns out that I am apparently ranking #5 in Google for the term “adwords tycoons” which is pretty good considering that this product has a pretty attractive affiliate program. The attached screenshot of Adwords Tycons shows you only a small number of ads, too.

Well, it seems like the makers of Adwords Tycoons are at it again. The email flood started quite a while ago and then resulted in a big finale last week. Towards the end of the week the emails became less which helped me to keep control over my inbox. So, I thought to myself that I should maybe ask these guys for a free review version of their product. Since I am ranking pretty high for the main search term and my blog shows a pretty nasty title – what better way to prove me wrong. I offered a fair and honest review, but never heard back. Now you can read this two ways. #1 they know they got a shitty product and Adwords Tycoons is indeed a big rip off and asking for a review would be another shot in the foot. Or they did not get my email or rather ignore it because they are ‘swimming’ in money that they made from the sales. You decide.

Here would be my public offer for the makers of Adwords Tycoons. Send me a free review version of the entire package. I am willing to put $1,000.00 into my Adwords account running campaigns following their system. If it works as advertised I will pay them $997.00 (their sales price) and I will write a very honest and detailed review about the product and how it worked for me + update my negative blog post mentioned before with my findings. But if it does not work they will not get a single dime from me and I will write a honest and detailed review about how shitty the product really is. That negative review would then be posted in different affiliate related blogs and it would be promoted inside the affiliate marketing community.I think that sounds like a fair deal. We will see if these guys are really as good as they say they are or if Adwords Tycoons is really just another (well-promoted) rip off as most people I talked to think about it?!

So, if you like the idea of this posting, please notify the makers of Adwords Tycoons. What better way to prove if a product works or is just shitty!? PS: nofollow is applied

PPC Madness

I am back in PPC marketing lately, but with much less success then before. I stopped in September after the Google Adwords changes bumped up my pricing by about 20% and my profit margin shrank accordingly. As I was operating on a 30% profit margin the risk of making money or losing money was way too risky. I had all my PPC ads on auto-pilot and in such a case 30% for doing no monitoring whatsoever was a good deal. Those days are gone. I am now trying to break into a much more competitive PPC niche and that is difficult. I am using a couple different software packages to figure outpricing and to spy monitor competitors. The numbers for certain keywords are just crazy and I see people bidding on them day after day after day. I am not sure how long these guys are doing it and so I am watching for now. The interesting thing is when you look at the landing pages (please note: I copy the URLs and DO NOT click on the ads). In some cases I wonder how they can maintain a quality score that is not “Poor”?! There is almost no text on those landing pages and mainly images. I tried that in the past and always came home with a ‘bloody nose’ because Google slapped me hard.

So far I spent about $70.00 on PPC ads and I expect that to increase dramatically over the next few weeks. No conversions yet – I am mainly testing the waters. I also have not yet fully decided on landing page layout and will have a lot of work to do in that area. If the other guys continue to spend money I might try a similar design, but hopefully will be able to get better quality scores assigned and therefore reduce my cost to beat them.

My very First YouTube.com Upload

Today I uploaded my very first video to Youtube.com. I am in the process of working with the Camtasia screen capture software to produce small tutorial movies and other things that come to my mind. The only way to become proficient with it is to actually make movies. While my first 2 or 3 attempts were really bad, I am now getting a slow grip on everything. The video is still considered amateurish in my opinion, but I think maybe I can gain some feedback about what to improve by posting it to Youtube.com. The video is actually a web hosting review of the current specials of a specific web hosting company. I want to use those reviews on one of my websites as add-on content to written reviews. Depending on how good I get with the software I will do more soon. I really like the video tutorial stuff. So, please feel free to check it out and let me know what you think.

Video content can be a significant source of attraction to get new visitors to a website. It is a cool way to post content to a website, but from an SEO perspective videos can be difficult to seo. Sure, if you get a lot of link juice pointing at the video it might rank high, but you want to make sure you also post enough keyword enriched content on the same page the video is being displayed on. So, for me I want to track to see how good or bad a Youtube.com video upload can work for a small website. I do not expect huge viewer ratings or numbers, but in general it will be interesting to see what Joe Average can do with an average video.

If you want to check out my video web hosting review here.

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