Wednesday, 29th April 2009
The Keyword Research Pro keyword research software is one of my favourites but I have to tell you there are some major bugs in this software and the customer support is terrible.
The problem with a lot of keyword software is they grab data from Google.com “illegally”, which means they do not use the legitimate way of getting data from Google through APIs. You may get a lot of Google stats from the Google AdWords API but it isn’t free.
What happens when you program a software to simulate searches? You’re getting results from your country and you will eventually hit a “Google block” on your IP address for making too many searches. Google isn’t stupid. They know it is virtually impossible for a human being to search a few thousand times in a short period of time.
I thought the software could simulate USA searches if I selected USA as the source but it does not work. The main problem for me while I was trying out the Keyword Research Pro was the number of ads and results returned in the software. I searched from a Thailand-based internet connection and the number of Google AdWords ads was close to zero for most …
Tagged As: Google search, google-adwords, keyword research pro, Search Engine Optimization
Tuesday, 21st April 2009
I was searching for mosquito screens in Bangkok on Alibaba.com when I noticed this “sourcing trends” link at the bottom right of the search pages. That link leads to Alibaba’s Latest Sourcing Trends page, which isn’t listed in their main navigation for some strange reason.
You’ll get a huge list of the hottest products on Alibaba.com. This is great information for people who are looking to sell products online or create a new mini site on these hot products.
Alibaba has another page called the Trade Trends. This is listed on the home page’s left menu. This list displays the products with rising demand and the top 20 hot products of every region or a certain country. The list of countries is not very extensive but they’ve got quite a few Asian countries, a few European countries, Australia, USA and Canada.
I’m going to add Alibaba to my Maverick Keyword Researcher application soon. This information is too good to ignore.
Wednesday, 8th April 2009
The Market Samurai keyword software has been hyped up a lot since it was closely promoted on the 30 Day Challenge site. It currently retails for $147 but you may get it at $97 or $127 some time after your trial. I did not purchase Market Samurai because I tried the trial and I wasn’t really impressed with it to invest $97 to $147 of my money into it.
Here’s why…
Market Samurai has a lot of formulas and new jargons that you have to get used to. Almost everyone who is remotely familiar with SEO would know what search counts and search results mean. The search counts are daily numbers and not the usual monthly figures. Market Samurai calls search results “Search Engine Competition” or SEOC. There is this “Phrase to Broad Match Ration” or PBR, which is the ration of the number of phrase matches of your keyword to the broad matches of your keyword. I am not sure how they decided that was a good indicator.
I find these new jargons extremely confusing and I have no idea how they decided that the value of a niche can be calculated by the estimated Google AdWords CPC and Google AdWords daily …
Tagged As: Cost per click, Google search, google-adwords, Search Engine Optimization
Friday, 3rd April 2009
I am writing this short review of this old keyword research software as a series of keyword software reviews. Most of these keyword research software are crappy because they do not provide you with accurate statistics from Google or they do not give you all the data you want.
You need a Google AdWords account to retrieve Google.com’s statistics. You would assume that the information you get from the software would be similar to what you would get if you check it out at Google AdWords, right? Unfortunately, there is a bug with Keywords Analyzer 7.68, which is the latest version at the time of this post. This software has been around for quite a few years and it is disappointing that it still has bugs like this.
For this example, I did a search on the keyword “acuvue”, in quotes for Google’s phrase matching. Keywords Analyzer gave me 550000 searches and 791000 search results. This made the KEI extremely high. There is something seriously wrong here.
I did a check for the keyword at the Google AdWords keyword tool. What I found was the …
Tagged As: google-adwords, Pay per click, Search Engines
Friday, 3rd April 2009
Micro Niche Finder has been around since last year. It seems to be relatively popular but I do not find it very user-friendly and useful for me. The videos on the Micro Niche Finder web site are really great. They are so good that they give you the false impression on its true worth.
The thing about Micro Niche Finder that bugs me the most is it cannot display the search counts for imported keywords from a text file. You only get search counts if you enter a search term in the search field. Other than that, sometimes, the Brainstorm and Hot Trends features do give you the search counts. I keep getting “Dig This” for my search counts. If you click on it, you will see a list of related keywords that may or may not display the search count for that keyword. This is extremely frustrating. What’s worse? Sometimes you see weird ***** in the search count column. Overall, the search count is quite pathetic and there is no reason why it cannot be improved.
Another thing that bugs me about …
Tagged As: Cost per click, Google, google-adwords, Keyword, Micro Niche Finder, Microsoft, Web search engine
Thursday, 26th March 2009
I just had an idea for an internet marketing related product. It is going to be a web application for mining keywords from sites like Google, mySimon, Shopping.com and some other web sites that provide a list of popular searches.
Since it will be a web application, it will be cross platform and you may run it on your own web server or computer. This isn’t something that will replace all your keyword software but it will complement them very well.
Most keyword analyzing software requires you to input a list of keywords to find out more stats about them. This is where I will offer a solution. Most keyword software aren’t doing what I am doing to get niche ideas and hopefully I can fill this void.
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Tagged As: Google, Keyword, mysimon, Shopping.com, Web server
Saturday, 7th March 2009
Don Reisinger wrote an interesting article on how he uses Twitter to replace RSS readers. Personally, I still use RSS readers from my Windows machine and I don’t think Twitter is going to replace that any time soon.
However, I do understand that this Twitter phenomenon is something that I cannot ignore. Instead of using Twitter to post nonsensical things about my daily life, I have started using twitterfeed to post my latest blog posts to my Twitter account. Another service that does something like twitterfeed is TweetLater . What twitterfeed and TweetLater do is they take your RSS feeds and post the latest contents of your feeds to your Twitter account automatically.
You may grab content from more than 1 RSS feed and post it into a single Twitter account. The end result is you have a new RSS feed that is made up of 2 RSS feeds because every Twitter account has a RSS feed too. The possibilities are endless.
I have experimented with combining all the RSS feeds of my site, Oasis Fanatic, to create a “site summary” of all the latest updates. All the latest updates are now posted to the …
Tagged As: Twitter
Monday, 15th September 2008
“The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More” has been out since 2006 and there is even a new revised version that was released some time this year. I should have read it earlier but I didn’t think I needed it 2 years ago.
The long tail approach to search engine optimization refers to the targeting of lower traffic and lower demand keyword phrases in larger numbers instead of trying to target higher traffic and high demand keyword phrases. High traffic and high demand keyword phrases are scarce while the lower traffic and lower demand keyword phrases are abundant.
Outside of the SEO context, the long tail refers to this:
Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, …
Tuesday, 19th August 2008
I have not caught on the social networking hype of registering on sites like Twitter. I did not want to waste my time on things like Twitter because I am not a person who likes to check out what’s the latest news about other people except for my favourite band, Oasis.
A few weeks ago, I decided to test the status feature of Facebook. I was feeling happy and relieved that this unpleasant house mate of mine was going to move out soon in early August so I added a countdown message that went something like “3 more days to go”. Some of my friends started sending me messages asking me what I was counting down to!
When my house mate moved out, I changed my status message to something like “So long sucker, hope you don’t steal other people’s shampoo and take other people’s stuff in the future!”. A female friend of mine then asked me what caused me to get so upset.
Now I am beginning to understand why sites like Twitter are so popular. Some people just love these one-liners and have to know more. I think I should start …
Tagged As: Facebook, Message, Social network, Social network service, Social-media, Status message, Twitter
Wednesday, 9th July 2008
Finally! Google has decided to reveal the monthly and yearly searches for every keyword phrase searched on Google.com. I hope there is an API for this so that all the keyword software makers can integrate this into their software as soon as possible.
According to Google AdWords Help Center:
The Approx Search Volume [Previous Month] column shows search volume statistics for the last calendar month. The Approx Avg Search Volume column shows average monthly search volume over a recent 12-month period.
Since Yahoo’s Overture keyword tool is officially dead, this tool is the next best thing at the moment. Google should have done this earlier.
Tagged As: AdWords, Google, Google Advertising Professional, Google search, Search Engines, Searching, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Search Marketing
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