It’s faster to search for “keyword tool”, than to type in the address. Especially when I know Google will always display the result that I want in the first position. But the above result shows two similar results. Look closely.

Yes, there are slight differences – one url has .au, for Australia, so when the resulting page displays, the country is preselected. But everything else is the same – surely that would have been enough to trigger the duplicate filter, and only display one result.

Unless you’re Google, of course.

But now Brad Callen has gone and created a free AdWords keyword spy tool that will let anyone spy on what keywords their competitors are advertising with!

PPC Web Spy lets you see other keywords and ads used by your competitors.

Let’s say you are searching for “dog training”.
When you install this PPC spy tool into your (Firefox) browser, it creates a button under each ad.
Click the button and you can see the other keywords this person is also advertising for.
PLUS THE AVERAGE POSITION, COST PER CLICK, CLICKS PER DAY AND COST PER DAY!

This is absolutely priceless information. From a free tool!

One of the few times I really need to use upper case exclamation marks in my blog. It’s that good.

If you advertise on Google AdWords, you really need this tool.

PPC Web Spy

Another winner from Brad Callen.

It’s expensive, so I only pay for around 6-7 clicks per day. And I get annoyed when people spam those clicks.

Yesterday I had a business proposition entered in my request-more-information form.

They were trying to flog me the latest google backdoor secrets offer, promising they could get me Google traffic for a lot less money, beating the system, and buying their product. They apologetically were sending me to a free website at GoDaddy – with ugly free ads at the top of their splash page.

They tried to make out that it was a business approach.

Give me a break guys. Could there be anything less inspiring that what you did?

You clicked on my Google Ad, costing me money.
You don’t have a proper website.
You didn’t use the correct form on my website.
You didn’t research me.

My ad already has a 15% CTR, enough conversions to keep me happy at a small scale, has great relevance between the 4 keywords I chase, against the ad title, content and domain. I’m a Perry Marshall accolyte.

You’d better be pretty sure that you can improve my stats. And next time, try to get a proper website up, if you’re selling Google secrets.

That was the most laughable moment of my inbox yesterday.

It’s very cool seeing photos of your street. Gee, my hedge looked neat!

Our photos were obviously taken at Christmas time – there was Santa Claus and a reindeer on our roof.

Despite this, when I showed my high school son the photos, he immediately ran outside to wave at the camera.

I won’t say anything about his hair colour….

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.