Alex Pooley's Blog

I haven’t posted to my blog for a while because I’ve been in the lab working all hours to finish my latest product. I’ve just released a new product for the search engine marketing crowd. Keyword Explode is a desktop application that will build a list of base keywords so quickly and so comprehensive that you will literally blindside your competition.

For those who are unaware, there are two sides to the search engine optimization equation. There are the searchers that send out queries to search engines, and there are publishers that provide what searchers are looking for. The job of a search engine is to connect these two groups as efficiently as possible. The more accurately a web page can tailor it’s content, back links, and adverts around search terms, the better the page will rank in the search engines for those particular search terms.

The typical strategy is to create a base set of keywords that broadly defines what content/search terms a site is targeting, and then to use the base keyword list to create more specific terms that pages, links, ads will target. So, say you wanted to start a blog about horses. Your base keyword list may be something like:

• horse
• donkey
• pony

If you could, you would target these keywords directly in your content/links/ads but they are way too competitive. Therefore, it’s necessary to target something we are more likely to compete with. To do this, we create more specific terms using modifiers and the base keywords above. Modifiers we may use include:

• brown
• American
• evil

Then you permute the modifiers with the base keywords so you get:

• brown horse
• American horse
• evil horse
• brown donkey
• American donkey
• evil donkey
• brown pony
• American pony
• evil pony

Another option instead of adding modifiers to the base keyword list is to use search mining services. These services mine what search terms users search with, and can return more specific search terms for whatever keywords you have. Say you ask for more searches that include the term “horse”. The mining service may return a bunch of results and one of them might be the query “American brown horse” with an estimated 1,500 searches over the last 30 days.

By creating more specific keywords we have narrowed the amount of other publishers we have to compete with. The problem is that the process I’ve just gone through is pretty much the process everyone goes through. So now instead of competing against 100 people with “horse”, we’re targeting 80 of those 100 by aiming for “brown horse”.

To gain an edge, extensive keyword research is performed in the hope of finding keywords that other people haven’t thought of. There’s a few problems with this:

1. It’s very time consuming
2. There are still other people that will perform the same research you do. This includes reading the same top 10 Google results that you read.
3. Because the English language is finite, there is a finite set of keywords. Yet, you never know how many more unknown words there are to find. Imagine researching for an extra half day for nothing because you already had an exhaustive list of keywords.

The trick in keyword research is to find the most base keywords possible, because all your other efforts derive from the base keyword list. Adding just one extra base keyword can result in exponentially more content, links, and ads. The bonus with lots of base keywords, is that the more you find, the less likely your competition will have all of them.

Keyword Explode solves these problems through it’s understanding of words and word relationships. With Keyword Explode, you can very quickly build a comprehensive list of base keywords that you can use to build content, links, and ads. All you need to do is think of some seed words for your niche, to use the previous example above we could simply use “horse”. Then you iterate through a process of expanding your current list of keywords, and culling what you don’t want. It’s essentially a three button process that will only take you a few minutes. You can watch a demo of the keyword research tool.

Keyword Explode is much more than a fancy thesaurus. A thesaurus only understands similar words, Keyword Explode knows similar words too, but it also understands that a beagle is a dog, a tire is part of a car, and that a house contains a toilet. You simply will not find anything else like this on the market. There are some services that return keywords your competition are using, but what good is it using the same keywords our competition are using? That’s exactly what we are trying to minimize!

I have more information about keyword research and information on related stuff like latent semantic indexing and the long tail over at the Keyword Explode product page. Check out those links and you will see that Keyword Explode is the easiest, and most comprehensive keyword generation tool around.