No Comments Written by Robert on July 29, 2008 – 11:27 pm

Another extremely effective method for doing keyword research involves using the subscription fee-based Keyword Discovery research tool, located at www.keyworddiscovery.com. Keyword Discovery is available for a monthly or yearly subscription fee and offers a wealth of information to aid in your keyword research.

With Keyword Discovery, you can generate a large list of head and tail terms for any topic you choose, including many industry terms you may not yet be aware of. The Keyword Discovery tool returns a large list of keywords that are related to the base keyword you use when performing a search. For example, by typing the base keyword “cheese” into Keyword Discovery you get a list of keywords that are related to your base keyword “cheese.”

Your Keyword Discovery search report is sorted by search volume, starting with high volume head terms at the top of the list down to low volume tail terms at the bottom of your list. For example, head terms such as “cheese” and “gourmet cheese” appear at the top of your keyword report, and tail terms such as “gourmet cheese basket” and “Italian hard cheese” appear toward the bottom.

Keyword Discovery keyword documents can help you connect with your target audience because the reports come from aggregate data collected from 200 search engines. Each report provides you with the exact terms your potential customers are using when they search for your product or service online.

If you use a representative sample of the keywords downloaded from Keyword Discovery when you generate your content and optimize your Web site, you greatly increase your chances of generating large volumes of traffic through organic rankings. An added benefit of analyzing the lists Keyword Discovery provides is that you can analyze word popularity. The keywords “dancewear” and “dance wear” are common variants of each other, yet one is searched for nearly 20 percent more often than the other. The more knowledge you have about your keywords and how your audience searches for them, the greater your chances of gaining large amounts of search-engine traffic.

The results in Keyword Discovery vary depending on what database you select in Step 4. Some of the available databases include:

• The Global Premium Database contains the number of searches done at various engines over the last 12 months. This database is filtered, and is free from any possible skew caused by automated searches.
• The Historical Global Database covers results from search engines across the globe and gives you the number of searches performed for a term from June of 2005 to the present. The information in this database is compiled from roughly 200 different sources.
• The Shopping Database provides you with the number of times a keyword was searched for at the major online shopping Web sites such as Amazon, Buy.com, and Bizrate.com. The shopping database also provides information on searches done for specific product SKU numbers.
• The eBay Database provides the number of times a certain keyword was searched for at the popular auction site eBay. This data can be very useful if you are monetizing your site with the eBay affiliate program or with eBay affiliate networks such as AuctionAds.com.

Analyze Keywords with Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery includes several useful advanced features that enable you to analyze your lists of keywords, including information on the number of occurrences of a keyword throughout a Web site, overall keyword effectiveness, and predicted daily search volume.

Keyword Discovery advanced features allow you to achieve a better understanding of what keyword rankings are realistically available, and the directions in which your SEO work is most likely to achieve positive results. Keyword Discovery’s number-of-occurrences feature provides an estimated number of pages that use a given keyword. The higher this number, the more pages there are likely competing for the top organic positions for the keyword.

Generally speaking, a lower number is better for your Web site. Keyword Discovery’s keyword effectiveness indicator, or KEI, is a simplified value scale from 0 to 10 that provides a snapshot of the potential for each keyword. The KEI compares the number of searches for a keyword with the number of search results to pinpoint which keywords are most effective for your campaign. The general idea is that the higher KEI value a keyword has, the more likely it is to rank well for that particular term. However, this value ignores the strength of the top-ranking sites and focuses instead on the relation of searches to the number of competing sites.

Keyword Discovery’s predicted-daily-searches feature provides you with a prediction for how many searches occur daily across the entire Internet for a given keyword. Although Keyword Discovery pulls data from more than 180 search engines, it does not capture data from every search performed. Therefore, keep in mind that the Keyword Discovery predicted-daily-searches is an educated estimate of the actual search volume.

When you use the Analyze section of Keyword Discovery, keep in mind that the data is not derived from actual data, but from best guess estimates. This data should be combined with other keyword generation tools such as KeyCompete.com and Compete.com to form the starting point of your keyword research. The biggest advantage of the Keyword Discovery tool is the ability to narrow your potential keyword pool down to words that are the most effective for your Web site. From there, you can look at who is currently ranking for these terms, such as Seodigger.com and the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool, to find even more information. The estimated data is derived from a comparison between the engines that Keyword Discovery uses to gather data and the total number of searches done online every day. For example, if the engines that provide data to Keyword Discovery process 5 percent of the monthly searches, multiplying that data by 20 gives a rough estimate of the total search volume actually performed.

Filter Keywords with Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery offers a keyword filter tool that is incredibly useful when expanding on existing keywords for both PPC and SEO campaigns. The filter enables you to automatically add a prefix, suffix, or both to each keyword on a list, which is far more reliable than performing similar functions manually. In addition, the Keyword Discovery filter tool can accomplish timeconsuming keyword edits and additions in seconds, saving you valuable time.

Aside from the prefix and suffix additions, the filter tool also offers a mass findand- replace tool, which is a valuable option for adding common synonyms into your keyword list. Using the Keyword Discovery filter tool to expand your preliminary keyword list is very helpful when building out a PPC account for an e-commerce site. For example, the filter tool allows you to easily insert descriptive prefixes and suffixes onto the base keywords that are commonly used when someone is searching with the intent to make a purchase. Adding prefixes like “buy” or “discount” and suffixes like “on sale” to your general keywords ensures that your ads are shown to people who are actively looking to purchase your products. The filter tool can also help enhance your SEO efforts. When looking for new keywords to target, you can greatly benefit from experimenting with prefixes, suffixes, and synonyms.

As with building out a PPC keyword list, you can add common prefixes and suffixes to your base keywords and also introduce common synonyms to further expand your list. This aids in content building because you can also analyze the search volume for all your newly generated keywords. This may lead to the discovery of low competition phrases with fairly significant volume. Moreover, keywords that contain prefixes or suffixes tend to be easier to rank for than keywords without such extensions.

Keyword Discovery’s keyword filter tool gives you the option to import the meta keywords from any Web page URL. Meta keywords are the keywords Webmasters use within the keyword meta tag of a Web site to highlight important keywords for reference by search-engine spiders.

Keyword Discovery’s keyword filter tool is very useful when researching your competition. By importing the meta keywords of your competition, you can get a very good feel for the keywords they have decided to target. You can utilize your competitors’ selected keywords as a base list and expand on them by using prefixes, suffixes, and synonyms. You can also input each competitor’s keywords into the research tool and see if they have missed a higher volume keyword with manageable competition.

If you have a keyword project already built within Keyword Discovery, you can easily import the list into the keyword filter tool. All you need to do is click the project name in the box labeled Projects and then click the Load button. You can then make any additions to your list using the keyword filter tools, and save the newly generated keywords to your project by clicking Save Filtered Results to Selected Project. You always want to save your projects, especially because you can combine, compare, and contrast keyword lists generated from various keyword research tools.