Can you give me an idea of the different keyword research tools available on the Internet?

Mike Averton


Answer:

Hi Mike,

Here's a list of some tools that help you research the keywords that are applicable for your site:

a) http://inventory.goto.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ - Once you type in a word or some words, Goto's Search Terms Suggestions tool helps you locate keywords which contain those words. It also gives you a count of how many people searched for those keywords in Goto and its partners' sites. The main disadvantage of Goto's tool is that it doesn't recognize plural keywords. This means that for many keywords, you have to use intuition to figure out whether most people search for the singular or plural version of the keywords.

b) http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&wordtracker/ - WordTracker's keyword generation tool not only locates keywords which contain the word or phrase that you typed in but also helps you locate related keywords which may not necessarily contain the words that you typed in. Of course, it also gives you the popularity of the different keywords. Unlike Goto, it distinguishes between plural and singular keywords. It has a free trial version which has restrictions regarding the number of keywords it generates, and a paid version which removes these restrictions and also contains additional features.

c) http://www.7search.com/scripts/advertiser/sample_get.asp - 7Search is a pay per click search engine. Like Goto's tool, once you a type in a word or some words, this tool will help you locate keywords that contain these words, and will also give you a count of how many people searched for those keywords. Unlike Goto, it distinguishes between plural and singular keywords. On the flip side, it only generates keywords in which the words that you typed in come in exactly the same order. For example, if you type in "travel australia", the keyword "travel to australia" is not generated. Also, 7search is not as popular a search engine as Goto, and its results may not be representative of the popularity of keywords in other search engines.

d) https://adwords.google.com/AdWords/Welcome.html - Google's AdWords program is intended to help you show text ads in Google when someone searches for certain keywords in Google. When you design your ads using this system, Google will tell you approximately how many impressions a particular keyword will get if you decide to display your ad for that keyword. This gives you an idea of the relative popularity of different keywords in Google. As Google has become an extremely popular engine among users, the relative popularity of keywords as shown by Google may be representative of the popularity of keywords in other engines.

e) http://www.iboost.com/tools/keyword_generator.htm - This keyword generator does a good job of generating keywords related to the one you type in. However, it does not give you the popularity of different keywords. Hence, you would need to plug the keywords that it generates into one of the above four tools to find the popularity of the keywords.

Then, you have a couple of tools that arrange the keywords that have been searched on in those sites in descending order of popularity. They are not as useful as the above tools because they don't allow you to discover new keywords by typing in some words or phrases. Here are 2 such tools:

f) http://crosslinkz.com/cgi-bin/se/hsx.cgi?show=top_searches - The keywords used in Crosslinkz

g) http://helpwaresites.com/search/hsx.cgi?show=top_searches - The keywords used in Helpwaresites.com

Apart from this, you have various "search voyeurs" which give you a real-time look at what people are searching for. These too are not as useful as the first five tools because you need to continuously monitor them on a 24 hour basis to find out some keywords that are applicable for your site. Here are a few such tools:

h) http://www.askjeeves.com/docs/peek/ - What people are searching for in Ask Jeeves.

i) http://www.excite.com/search/voyeur/launch - What people are searching for in Excite.

j) http://www.infotiger.com/voyeur - What people are searching for in InfoTiger.

k) http://www.metaspy.com/ - What people are searching for in the MetaCrawler meta search engine.

l) http://www.kanoodle.com/spy/ - What people are searching for in the Kanoodle pay per click search engine.

m) http://savvy.search.com/snoop - What people are searching for in the Search.com meta search engine.

n) http://mopilot.com/index.htm?go=live.php3 - What WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) users are searching for on the Internet. WAP is used in cellular phones.

o) http://softwaresolutions.net/free.htm - The Word Market is a free software meant for Windows users to find out in real time what people are searching for in the major search engines.

Then, you also have various lists which show the most popular keywords as a whole. These too will probably not be as useful as the first five, unless some of those popular keywords are applicable for your site. Here are 3 such tools:

p) http://www.goto.com/d/popular/ - Popular searches at Goto, arranged in various categories.

q) http://50.lycos.com/ - The top 50 searches at Lycos.

r) http://www.searchterms.com/ - The top 100 searches in a major search engine, the name of which the site does not disclose.

Lastly, you have a company providing paid custom reports on the keywords applicable for your site. I haven't tried these reports, so I don't know how good they are.

s) http://www.wordspot.com/ - They provide a 500 word custom report on the keywords applicable for your site. They also have a free report of the 200 most popular keywords and a paid report of the 1000 most popular keywords.

For more information on selecting the most effective keywords for your site, see my article on this topic at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&keywords.htm


QUESTION 2:

I would like to know a bit more about stop words. What are the words that are considered as stop words by the engines? Do all the engines treat the same words as stop words? If not, how do I find out which engines treat which words as stop words?

Nigel Carpenter


Answer:

Hi Nigel,

Stop words are words that are commonly used in sentences, but which by themselves don't carry any meaning. Examples of stop words include "and", "the", "a" etc. Many search engines ignore such words when they are indexing a page and may ignore such words when someone makes a query containing such words. They do this in order to save storage space in their hard drives and also to improve the speed at which they can produce the results of a query.

Different search engines consider different words as stop words. I don't have a list of which search engines consider which words as stop words. The best way to find out if a particular word is considered a stop word in an engine is simply to type that word in the engine. If the search engine produces some results for that word, it doesn't consider that word to be a stop word. If it doesn't produce any results, it is a stop word in that engine.

I made a few experiments with the words "and", "a", "an" and "the" in some of the engines which have their own spiders. The results are pretty interesting:

AltaVista considered "and", "a" and "the" to be stop words but not "an".

Direct Hit considered "and", "a" and "an to be stop words but not "the".

Excite considered "and", "a", "an" and "the" to be stop words.

Fast didn't consider any of the words to be stop words.

Google considered "and", "a", "an" and "the" to be stop words.

Inktomi based engines (like IWon) considered "and", "a", "an" and "the" to be stop words.

Northern Light considered "and" to be a stop word, but not "a", "an" and "the".


QUESTION 3:

I have heard that Inktomi is an important engine to which I should submit my site because many search engines take their results from Inktomi. Which are the search engines which take their results from Inktomi? Also, I went to www.inktomi.com to submit my site, but couldn't find a way by which I could do it. Can you point me to the URL where I can submit my site to Inktomi?

Patrick Burrows


Answer:

Hi Patrick,

Inktomi doesn't provide a public search engine in a way that search engines like AltaVista or Google do. Instead, it licenses its search technology and database to other portals and sites on the Internet. While some of them display results which are taken directly from Inktomi's database, others display results from Inktomi after displaying results from another source.

Here are the major sites which use Inktomi. I have also noted how each of them use Inktomi's database.

i) http://www.iwon.com - IWon's results are taken directly from Inktomi.

ii) http://hotbot.lycos.com - The first few results in Hotbot are taken from Direct Hit. The remaining results are taken from Inktomi.

iii) http://www.msn.com - MSN first displays results from the Looksmart directory and then displays results from Inktomi.

iv) http://www.aol.com - AOL first displays results from the Open Directory and then from Inktomi.

v) http://www.looksmart.com - Looksmart first displays results from its own directory. It then provides an option to see results from Inktomi.

vi) http://www.nbci.com - NBCi's results have three sections - a Top Sites section (which is displayed by default) containing sites that have been reviewed by NBCi editors, a Member-Submitted Sites section containing sites that have been submitted by NBCi's members but have not yet been reviewed by its editors, and an Additional Sites section which contain results from Inktomi.

vii) http://www.goto.com - Goto first displays results from sites that are paying it for each visitor that Goto sends to the site. After that, it displays results from Inktomi.

As far as submitting your site to Inktomi is concerned, Inktomi itself doesn't provide an option to submit your site. However, it makes this option available on other sites. It now has a paid submission option which will ensure that a particular page that you have paid for is present in its database for one year and that the page is re-spidered once every 48 hours. For this, you can either go to http://www.positiontech.com/inktomi/ or to http://networksolutions.com/en_US/catalog/searchsubmit/

You can also submit your site for free to Inktomi (but with no guarantees as to when your site will be spidered). For this, you can go to http://www.anzwers.com.au/cgi-bin/print_addurl.pl or http://hotbot.lycos.com/addurl.asp You can also submit your site to Inktomi by going to our free submission page at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&submission.htm and then submitting your site to Hotbot using the form present in that page.