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Free Keyword Research Training

Shane — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:20:43 +0000

I’ve just finished putting together a free keyword research training program, called “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Keyword Research, But Were too Afraid to Ask”. I know, silly title.

You can get it by checking out the “Free Stuff” tab in the navigation bar, by clicking here or you can watch the video below to get some more details. Actually, you should really watch the video below, because there’s a catch to this deal and in the video, I explain what it is…

Click here to get access the the Keyword Research Training!

If you’ve already seen the guide, I’d love to know what you think about it. Leave a comment below (also increases your awesomeness by 126%).

Cheers,

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Market Samurai vs. Keyword Blueprint vs. Keyword Elite 2.0

Shane — Mon, 10 May 2010 06:35:51 +0000

Keyword research forms the foundation of any kind of online marketing endeavour. Without proper keyword research, a marketing campaign is dead in the water. No wonder then, that advanced keyword research programs come in many shapes and sizes. This post is a quick roundup featuring three of the most popular keyword research tools: Market Samurai, Keyword Blueprint and Keyword Elite 2.0.

Read on to see the roundup video and a short summary for each contestant.

Roundup Video

Market Samurai

Market Samurai, made by Noble Samurai, is a very extensive research tool, that does way more than just find good keywords. It was designed to be something of a “base camp” for all your online marketing efforts.

I know is that a lot of people love Market Samurai, but I have to say that I never really warmed up to it’s user interface. I’m not a big fan of how the keyword discovery component is separate from the keyword analyses part, but I realise that this is probably just due to my personal tastes.

Market Samurai’s greatest feature is without a doubt the SEO competition module. It manages to give you a lot of detailed, in-depth information about the competition strength of any given keyword, but also manages to give you an idea of whether you can rank for the keyword at a single glance.

Market Samurai is probably the greatest bargain among the three programs in this roundup, even though it’s not cheap. You can truly launch and maintain an online marketing career without requiring any further tools.

Keyword Blueprint

Keyword Blueprint is a product created by Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton (the “Blueprint-Guys” who have made Commission Blueprint, Niche Blueprint and many others). There are actually two components to this program: On the one hand, there is a research module for SEO campaigns and on the other hand there is a research module and an offer evaluator for PPC campaigns.

Keyword Blueprint’s greatest strength is also it’s main weakness: It’s very minimalistic and straight forward. You can easily browse through tons of keywords and explore lots of options and you can see at a glance what the search volume is like and whether or not there are many AdWords ads displayed for any given search term.

You can then let the program evaluate the competition strength for you, and again, the results are at-a-glance, as they are represented with a simple icon.

The problem is that you don’t get any additional details. You don’t know exact numbers for backlinks and metrics for on-page optimization for the competing sites, for example.

In practice, I find that Keyword Blueprint is ideal for discovering new keywords, but I find myself going over to Keyword Elite to check the ones I find in more detail.

Keyword Elite 2.0

Keyword Elite is created by Bryxensoft, Brad Callen’s company. Like Market Samurai, it offers features that go beyond simple keyword research and many of them, like the one that finds you potential JV partners and opportunities for integration marketing, are pretty ingenious.

From a research perspective, the most useful component is the “Search Engine Dominator” which provides competition analysis in absolutely minute detail. The only metric missing is the number of backlinks pointing to the root domains of the top listed sites (KE2 only shows the number of links pointing to the actual page listed).

Keyword Elite 2.0 is also the only one of the three tools that can pull data from several different sources simultaneously, meaning that it can create absolutely vast lists of related keywords. You can also easily add modifiers and filters to those keyword lists, before carrying them over to one of the more advanced analysis modules.

Overall, Keyword Elite is currently my favourite keyword research program.

The Perfect Solution

Having tried all three research tools, I have to say that the perfect solution would be a combination of the three. I’d love to have a tool that allows me to explore keywords like Keyword Blueprint does, then gives me the in-depth analysis data that Keyword Elite offers, but displays it including the domain backlinks and in the style of the competition matrix in Market Samurai…

Owning and working with three different programs isn’t very practical, however, so here are my recommendations:

The overall best research tool is Keyword Elite 2.0.

If you want to do research and evaluation for PPC campaigns, get Keyword Blueprint (comes with Commission Blueprint and isn’t separately available, as far as I know).

If you are looking for an all-in-one tool that includes content and product research, but is slightly un-intuitive on the keyword research front, Market Samurai is a good choice.

Note: This page contains affiliate links. Please refer to the disclaimer for more information.

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Interview With Google Sniping Expert Gary Gregory

Shane — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:27:10 +0000

Today’s post is a very special one, because it is the first in a series of interviews with Internet marketing experts from many different fields of expertise like SEO, PPC, social media etc.

My first guest is Gary Gregory from Google Sniper Keywords. He is probably the most experienced Google Sniper out there, with over 100 sniper sites under his belt. In the interview, we talk about some of the most common difficulties people have when they start out with online marketing, find out what Gary’s manual and training is all about and learn why it pays off to be stubborn, in this business.

Below, you can find the download link as well as the straming player for listening to the interview. Enjoy!

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Download Link

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The Keyword Minute (How The Hell Did I Miss This?)

Shane — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 12:31:47 +0000

Just today, I stumbled upon a small ebook/report by Brad Callen (the guy who made SEO Elite, Keyword Elite 2, the Article Submitter and lots of other Internet marketing goodies). This is a free, 36 page report that basically lists three quick and easy money-making tips.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Really? Some free and easy ways to make cash? What else is new?”

I know that this kind of thing is a dime a dozen (if that) and free “secret” reports are being flogged left and right. This case was a little different though, for two reasons:

1. Someone recommended it to me (someone I trust).

and

2. I’ve general had very good experiences with Brad Callen products. So I didn’t dismiss this off-hand.

–

To make a long story short: I downloaded the Keyword Minute, read it and was (slightly) amazed.

Yes, Callen’s software Keyword Elite 2 is pitched in the report. But there’s still really good value in there, even if you ignore the KE2 stuff. The three ideas are as simple as they are effective and somehow, they manage to be novel.

I should have gotten this report a long time ago, but somehow, I missed it. The way to get the report is to go to the KE2 sales page and wait for a few seconds. An opt-in box will pop onto the screen. Fill that out and you’ll get the Keyword Minute mailed to you.

It costs nothing and it’s good. Go for it and apply what you learn. Click here to get the Keyword Minute.

Match Types Explained – Broad Match, Phrase Match, Exact Match

Shane — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:58:15 +0000

Match types are very important for any kind of keyword research. I see many questions regarding the different match types in the forums I frequent and I have even seen some seasoned Internet marketers offer confusing or plain misleading explanations of what the match types mean.

Today’s post features the most simple, easy to understand and straight-forward explanation of Broad Match, Phrase Match and Exact Match you’ll ever find. Plus, it’s presented in text as well as in a video. This post will clear up any questions about this important subject you may have.

Throughout the text, I will be using “blue vintage car” as an example for a search term. I picked this at random and you can choose any search term if you want to follow along and experiment with some Google searches. I recommend using a search term with three or four words to get results that best illustrate what the match types are all about.

Broad Match

The broad match is the most common type of search result. It is what you get when you type in a search term into Google as you normally would.

What does it do?
Broad match results are any websites that contain the words you typed in, in any order and any distribution.

So, while a site that contains the exact sequence of words “blue vintage car” is likely to show up in the results, other possibilities include:

Vintage car: blue
Vintage car with blue leather interior
Blue skies, vintage comics and car models.

Of course, a page featuring the words in the exact order you typed them in is likely to show up first in the results. If you take a look at pages ten and beyond in the results, you’ll see the words you typed spread ever further apart on the resulting pages. Here’s an example:

As you can see, the words are not in sequence and neither are they next to each other in this resulting page. But since all the words are present on the page, it’s still a broad match result.

Phrase Match

To see phrase match results, type in your search term in quotes:

What does this one do?
Phrase match results display websites that feature those exact words you typed, in the order you typed them in. As you can see on the picture above, this returns drastically fewer results than the broad search (almost 5 million results broad and fewer than 30’000 results phrase).

There can still be punctuation marks or symbols like brackets or slashes in between the words in the results-pages. Here’s an example result:

As you can see, even though there is a hyphen before the word “blue” and a comma afterwards, this is still a valid phrase match result for our search term.

One great use for typing your search term in quotes is when you remember part of a text but you can’t remember where you read it. If you can remember the exact sequence of five or more words you read on that page, a phrase match search will very likely return the page you are looking for.

Keyword Research/Advertiser Perspective

Here’s where most people seem to get confused with the whole match-type thing: The meaning of the match types differs depending on whether you are looking at them from the perspective of a regular search engine user or that of a keyword researcher or AdWords advertiser.

In this next section, let’s look at the significance of the match types have to you as an Internet marketer.

To follow along, fire up Google’s keyword research tool.
A very crucial factor in keyword research (and online marketing in general) is how often your chosen keyword is actually searched for. After all, it’s not much use to rank well for a term no one ever looks for. This is where the keyword tool can help us out. Let’s take a look at the search volume we get for our example term “blue vintage car” as well as the more popular term “vintage car”:

As we can see, there are roughly 320 broad searches for “blue vintage car” and over 200’000 monthly searches for “vintage car”.

Now, these are broad match results. This means that among those 320 searches could be examples like:

bright blue vintage car
vintage model car, blue
where to buy vintage models of a blue car

In other words, any search containing the three words “blue”, “vintage” and “car” is included in this count.

Now, let’s look at the phrase match results for the searches:

As you can see, there are now significantly less results listed. This is because the phrase match count only includes searches that contain the exact sequence of words typed in. There can still be additional words in a search, however. The following example searches would be included in the phrase match count:

buy blue vintage car
blue vintage car picture
more information about a blue vintage car

Finally, we have the option to search for exact matches:

Now, the numbers have shrunk even further. The reason is that the exact match only counts searches that are exactly, word for word, what you signify. So, in the above example, 18’100 is an estimate of the amount of times the exact words “vintage car” are typed into Google, each month. If someone types the words in a different order or ads another word (e.g. “bright blue vintage car”) that search is not counted.

As an advertiser, this can be very significant, since you might want your ads to display only when very specific terms are searched for. I don’t want to get into the whole AdWords research thing in this article.

Instead, I want to clarify a very common cause for confusion when it comes to keyword research:

Evaluating Competition Strength

I’m sure you’ve seen this as a simple piece of advice on how to find out how much competition you are up against: Type the keyword you want to target in quotation marks, i.e. do a phrase match search for it. This will return a number of results pages that is significantly lower than for the broad match term (see above).

“But,” the argument goes, “nobody searches for anything with quotes!”
True. Most searches are broad searches with the search term just typed in without any quotes or brackets. However, looking at the number phrase match results really is an indicator of competition strength. Why? Because the pages excluded from the phrase match results will be very, very easy to outrank with an optimized page.

If you make a page that features “blue vintage car” in the title and that exact combination again in the text, you’re already outranking all of those pages that have the three words spread all over the place.

That’s it. There’s the explanation for the whole “why phrase match?” question.

Having said that, the argument can be made that it doesn’t bloody well matter how many pages are listed in the results. What really matters is how strong the actual pages showing up on the first page for a broad search are. Lest I digress, I will write about this in a separate article.

For all your audio-visual learners, here’s a short video where I explain the concept of using phrase match for competition evaluation:

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Article Spinning Technique: Target Multiple Keywords

Shane — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:13:36 +0000

This video explains my second method (in Guruspeak it would be my “secret”) for making use of article spinning tools. Article spinning can help you potentially rank for several different keywords with just one full article written. In the video I show you how to do this and you’ll also see why it is, unfortunately, not quite as easy as one might hope. Check out the clip below to see what I’m talking about:

Ultimately, this technique does require a bit more work than I like to put up with. However, you can even do it without any spinning tool what so ever. You can just use the “find and replace” function in your word processor to get basically the same result.

If done right, you can really get a lot more traffic to your articles with this method, so give it a spin (brilliant pun, eh?).

Ok, my third article spinning technique is even better than this one, so sit tight for that third video.

Cheers,