I was doing keyword research for a client yesterday.

Rather than trust any one keyword source, I used a few.
1. The free Google Keyword suggestion tool, to see how many searches happen in a month, and how tough the competition is.
2. A dummy AdWords campaign. Throw heaps of money at it, and estimate the number of clicks possible.
3. A paid keyword database. One of the most high profile keyword sources, with a relatively costly monthly subscription.

The variations were stunning. The paid database was under-estimated by multiple orders of magnitude. (This was for Australian figures). Apparently the figures come from deals with ISPs, select SEs and panel samples.

Given that the future was unreliable, I thought I’d try the past.

Went to Google Keyword Suggestions, and looked for the phrase “choosing a dog”.
Google suggested 1300 searches last month. (although the average is 1000/month)
I have number 1 position at Google for that phrase, so I went to Google Analytics to see how much traffic they sent me last month, specifically from Google. I got 284 hits, which was pretty nice. It also meant that position 1 at Google got me 21% of their searches last month. Not bad for MyDogSite.

Tried it with another keyword, to see if that was a fluke.
Google Keyword Suggestion tool said that last month, there were 6600 searches for “Halloween Australia” in Australia. I went to Google Analytics, and looked at my stats. Last month I got 521 hits from Google for that one keyword. Again, it was number one for the keyword at Google for most of the month, so that equated to 7% of the traffic. For interest, that was www.halloween-australia.com, so it would look pretty relevant to searchers.

For fun, I tried one last search, on a smaller scale - for “David Jones Christmas windows” (I’m a Christmas junkie). Google said there were 36 searches last month. I got 4 of them. So 11% from position 1. Small scale, but it’s a niche. (See my Christmas Australia site).

Now the paid tool, whose name I no longer want to mention, said that I should have received 7 searches all year, for “Choosing a dog”. That’s a little different to Google’s figures of 1300/month, and my actual 284 hits.

They have a disclaimer that the figures cannot be comprehensive, and are meant for comparing to other keywords, relatively. Fair enough. But those figures are out by more than an order of magnitude. They’re just misleading for my purposes.

Yep. We are no longer subscribing to that service. The free Google tool has won.

I’ve decided to write a few articles about various subjects, and submit them to article directories, purely for the purpose of SEO.

In the past I’ve used an article submitter program that I had bought, but it still ended up being time-consuming, and not showing exemplary results. So this time I thought I would just use the main three or four article directories: isnare, ezinearticles and goarticles.

I created a pen name. Spelled differently, so it was easy to find on Google. Wrote and submitted an article.

Two weeks later I thought I’d search for my pen name on Google. It found 513 references. Pretty darn good.

But paging through the results, I found one reference that had the description wrong. Instead of saying “avid online shopper” and “a huge range”, it said “esurient online shopper” and “Brobdingnagian arrange”, as if they had run it through a thesaurus. No matter, he still provided a link back to my site. Although I’m glad I used a pen name. And hey, it makes it look original to Google, so it’s definitely a benefit to me. Thanks!

More annoying was the cheat who published my article without a link back. A nasty little internetandbusinessestechnique blog. At least he’s unranked.

Searching for a unique phrase from the article brought up three initial results at Google. And if you expand the results list, you get up to 72 links.

The site is currently at page 12, for the main targetted keyword, so it has a long way to go. The original article as it appears on isnare, is at page 11. So that provided a boost.

It’ll be interesting if I can get it up to page one before Christmas. That would be unreal. And financially rewarding.

A mate was twittered about the results on Cuil for a search for lolcat. Note that it wasn’t a search for lolcats plural. Just lolcat singular.

You’d think that would be worksafe. But it’s not.

The fact that Cuil displays an image next to each website in the results list, can lead to nasty surprises.
They need to have some kind of reporting and instant removal of unpleasant images.
I would not be happy for my kids to see the image returned.
It’s not for the official lolcats site - icanhascheezburger.com. It’s a different site. No need to mention it. But it’s adult.

On a related note, I can imagine people experimenting to see how they can control the image that is displayed next to their website. Getting a shocking image displayed could be a kind of linkbait - traffic attention-seeking.

As with all search engines, SEOs will be attempting to reverse-engineer the algorithm, to see how they can get their results at the top. Yet another area for people to specialise in. It will be interesting to see how much traffic Cuil gets. Fairly negative feedback so far.

Just heard about the new search engine, Cuil. Well it ain’t.

The logical first step was to search for my own sites. Especially those that rank well at the traditional major search engines.

sydney web design - www.sydney-web-design.com managed page 6 at cuil. Pity they couldn’t find the right web site image to display. Not sure why they displayed ireckon’s instead. Fail.

online shopping australia - gee, it displayed my old domain, best-australian.com, on page 1. Shucks, it even had my own content. Strange though. That content hasn’t existed since November 2007. Is that when they spidered it? The new owner only has crap ads. Fail.

mydogspace - well the .com.au doesn’t get a mention for a few pages. Strange. It’s number 1 at Google. And you’d have to say pretty relevant. Fail.

halloween australia - Cuil displays my sydney-web-design site. Cos I list my halloween site in my portfolio. Pity they didn’t have enough nous to display the actual relevant site. Fail.

Even more annoying is the way the data appears on my screen. I have a modest 17 inch screen. The bottom few rows of Cuil don’t fit on my screen, and I have to page down all the time. And the links to the next search results are so small you miss them at first.

Getting close to epic fail cuil guys.

Gotta say Google is tough on a girl sometimes.

I have a couple of sites that I would have to say were optimised for search engines.

Halloween Australia in particular, was hand-built with SEO in mind. Obviously creating a useful, interesting site was the most important thing, and I built a Halloween Events search-by-suburb function, so you can find local events and trick or treating streets. But the URL, page names, title, description, keywords, headings and content and image text were sprinkled with the targetted keywords. I even made it source-ordered, so that content appears before navigation, a true sign of an SEO-addict.

And MSN loves it. Number one for “halloween australia”. Yahoo is also pretty good - a strong page 1 result. But Google is sluggish. It has gradually crept up to page 2 on Google, but given that the whole site is dedicated to halloween in Australia, you’d think it would rate better than some of the others on the page, where halloween is a small part of a site.

The Christmas site is a little different. It’s a Drupal site, so it has a bit more overhead code than I would have chosen - so there’s a bit more stuff for spiders to wade through (lots of file includes), before getting to the content. But the URL, meta info and content are definitely oriented towards Christmas Australia. And yes, MSN loves it again (#1), Yahoo is page 1, and Google is languishing.

Yes, there is more competition for Christmas websites.

But the twist is that Christmas Australia is a replacement for an old site of mine that used to rank number 1 or 2 at Google, for the chosen keywords. Until I lost the domain when the renewal went astray. So if content really was king, the replacement site should have been ranking up near page one.

Back when I created the original site, I wrote a poem about Christmas in Australia, to add some original content to the front page. It really did give a significant boost to my rankings back then. And it’s been fun seeing my poem get quoted on a few other sites.

Most of the problems at Google would be off-page related. The domain is not very old and it doesn’t have enough incoming links. I corresponded with a few sites who used to link to my old site, and they said they would move the links across, but Google doesn’t appear to acknowledge these links.

The risk is that there is some old duplicate content hanging around from the old site, causing Google to ignore the new site.

I still have a few more functions and content I’d like to add, before I submit a reconsideration request to Google. It’s getting close to the time of year where you concentrate on Christmas sites - a few months before you need it.

So on the surface, I’m good at building sites for MSN and Yahoo. Google just needs to be slowly reminded that there is some good content there.