“Why is the Overture figure and Wordtracker always so different? Good question!” Jim Williams Executive Director JU2

Selecting effective keywords is vital to any search engine optimization campaign. Finding keywords that are effective in attracting the right visitors to your website is a matter of trying to put yourself in the minds of your potential customers. How do you find out which search queries your customers use to search for your products or services? Well, you can ask your clients directly, but properly designed market research doesn’t come cheap. You can check your website statistics, although this only tells you the phrases used by visitors who have already successfully found your website. It doesn’t tell you anything about the hordes of leads who gave up or went to one of your competitors. What other tools do you have at your disposal?

Most search engine optimization professionals trust Overture and Wordtracker’s keyword analysis tool. If you enter “pool” in Overture you will get 46,239 searches for January 2006. Compare this to Wordtracker which returns 1914 searches. Why the disparity? To understand this, you need to understand how Overture and Wordtracker arrive at these figures.

Overture’s Keyword Analysis Tool is designed to help advertisers choose effective keywords as part of a Yahoo Search Marketing pay-per-click advertising campaign. It gives you the total number of times a search query was entered into a search engine within the Overture network in the previous calendar month and includes searches from Yahoo! Search, AltaVista and MSN among others. On the other hand, Wordtracker obtains its figure from the entries made in Metacrawler and Dogpile, meta search engines that consult all the main engines simultaneously.

Additionally, due to the way that Overture provides search results to its partners, a single search often generates multiple queries. In addition to this Overture combines searches in plural, singular, uppercase and lowercase where the queries can have completely different possible meanings. While searches can also be augmented by automated queries using tools like automatic bid optimizers, search engine ranking monitors, and some web analytics packages, to name just a few.

How can you minimize the effect of duplicate and automated queries? Do what Wordtracker does and go to the meta search engines. Metacrawler and Dogpile have a much higher ratio of human to automated queries because there is little value in targeting them with automated bots. Automated bid optimizers and search engine ranking monitors are typically performed directly on the search engines themselves. Additionally, duplicate searches are eliminated because query counts are tabulated from a single source rather than combining results from a partner network. Unfortunately, although Dogpile and Metacrawler’s combined market share in January 2006 was less than 0.75% and they are considered niche search engines whose users tend to be much more technical savvy than the average Yahoo! user, can you guess? that Dogpile searches are similar to Yahoo! ? Probably not!

Which is the answer? As long as you understand that Overture and Wordtracker measure different things, both tools are invaluable help in selecting effective keywords for your search engine optimization campaign.

For more information on keyword research and selection, contact Jim Williams at www.ju2.com, call 0845 890 8855 or keep an eye on our blog at www.ju2blog.com [http://www.ju2blog.com/].