Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

For those of you who are clamoring for another in-depth BH article, don’t sweat, it’s coming tomorrow. But today, I wanted to pump out a full review of wordze. In-depth. Monday marks the last day for the 30 Days of WordZe Free promotional offer, so I can’t think of a better time to write one. For the purpose of this review, we’re going to say we’re interested in creating a site to monetize…”shoes”. That’s right folks. Shoes. This wasn’t chosen out of the blue. It was chosen because it’s a very saturated niche, with a lot of different longtails, and a lot of traffic. People buy clothing online all the time.

1. The WordZe Keyword Selector - Before anything, we’re going to want to search for our primary keyword, and see what longtails WordZe can spit out for us
   • Inputing the Keyword As you can see, we have the ability to put in both our keywords, and our project name. The results we decide to save get saved to the project name, so that we can dig them up later.
     For filtering/targeting, we have a panel not too different from that of any popular PPC program. However, we’re allowed to filter based on different topics; topics some places, like overture, have banned(try a search for “marijuana” on overture, and you’ll see what I mean)
   • Examining the Keyword Output Ok, so after we press “Search”, it’s going to bring up a massive list of keywords. 100 per page. In this particular case, it found about 10,000 keywords. It arranges from most searches to least, so we don’t waste time. If you want all of them, you can save them to a project, export, or call it later through the WordZe API. However, let’s take a look at the results. (Click the image to enlarge) Ok, so let’s take a look at what we have here. There are several columns. The keyword itself, “count” (the actual recorded # of searches), “estimated” (the # of monthly searches expected to exist), and a few trickier ones. When deciding what to target, we’re initially going to look at one of these mystery fields. “KEI”. KEI is a number WordZe generates that is essentially a ratio between how many searches there are per month, and how many results there are in Google. So a low KEI means that it’s more difficult to target. A high KEI(they extend upwards into infinity) means it’s easier to target. The higher, the better.
     
   • Selecting Your Niche Keywords I have taken the liberty of extracting a few keywords that I thought were particularly good for targetting. This will probably overflow my site layout, but whatever, I’ll put em here for you.
     Alright. So notice we’ve selected a few terms with good search volume, and a high KEI. So in theory, we should be able to target them. First, we should check a few things though. What if, say “Zebra Stripe Shoes” have gone out of style? The searches would not be there anymore. That brings us to…our next section.
2. The Historical Keyword Searches Historical keyword searches are an important tool, especially in more commonly SEOed niches than the one we’re using. In things like gambling, people often fudge the data, searching for a product a lot to attract SEOs. So we can detect that by looking for sharp rises. However, we have to weigh that out vs. things that might be an up-and-coming trend, which would also have a sharp rise. Or god forbid, a product going OUT of style. So here’s the graph for “Zebra Stripe Shoes” (Click to enlarge)
   
   Looking at this, we can see a sharp rise. Given the existence of the fashion world, and it’s rapid up and down trends, I’m going to say this one isn’t fudged data, but rather an up-and-coming trend. A great thing to SEO for. An additional hint for this, is that the countries that are searching for it are relatively spread out. Also, notice China/Eastern Europe(countries with a lot of proxies to fake data with in it), are not seen on the list. That additionally tells us the data is 100% legitimate. For smaller keywords(like this), you have to expand the graph to a larger period of time(60 days-1 year) to render. Larger keywords can be tracked day to day though. So let’s try our other keywords, with UNBELIEVABLY high KIE numbers. “martin dingman mens shoes” for example.
   (Click Image To Enlarge)
   With this, we see that the searches peak sharply, then go back to almost nothing. So this is not a good niche to target anymore. It was either manipulated, or was the result of a new shoe being released, which peaked and disappeared already. I don’t like that, so I’m going to avoid this keyword now. Note: Wordze buys its data from ISPs all over the world, so it is MUCH harder to manipulate than tools like overture, which draw from one source.
3. Determining How Competitive the Niche Truly Is: The WordRank Tool Ok. So now that we have a few keywords we like(I’m avoiding anything brand related for now, since those are more likely to be manipulated, and are more likely to “fall out of style”, it’s time to figure out exactly how competitive they are, using the Wordrank tool. Wordrank gives us a fair amount of data on the keyword, and is considered(even by WordZe itself) to be a much more accurate tool than KEI for showing how competitive a niche is.
   • Picking Apart Your Competitors Upon making a query to wordrank, the first thing you’ll see is some diagnostic data on both the domain of the top-rankers, and the url of the product. This includes how many inbound links per month the domain appears to be acquiring(an important tool), and also how well optimized the title/url of the top rankers are for this particular product.
     Woot! So there we can see our competitor’s data in all it’s glory. Pagerank of the url itself, of the domains, incoming link rates, etc. Guess what? There’s more!
   • Keyword Search Demographics Ok, so once again, the image I’m about to show below, click to enlarge it. It’s too big for me to put in the entry. Anyways, in addition to competitor data, you can see an output of demographics on who searched for what. This INCLUDES a breakdown by city, so if local targetting is your thing, have at it!
     (Click Image To Enlarge)
     
4. The Dig Tool No images on this one, but this lovely tool takes your given keyword, runs down the list of ranking sites for it, and actually figures out which keywords they’ve been optimizing for! That’s right. Presumably(not for sure though), it appears to look at title/h1 changes, and run through pulling out recent anchor text they’ve been acquiring that matches within the niche.
5. Other Useful Tools This entry has taken the better piece of the early afternoon to write, so I’m going to list a few more lovely features in one section here. Other Useful Information Includes:
   1. Most Popular Search Lists - Weekly or Monthly
   2. Thesaurus -This is MUCH more comprehensive than you’d think.
   3. Misspellings Generator: Doesn’t just shuffle words, but also checks to see if they’ve been searched for in the past. Brings back search volumes on each misspelling.
   4. WordZe API: Access WordZe’s information(keywords/search volumes) through your own scripts via their dandy XML feed.

The Downsides: I couldn’t find many downsides to WordZe’s service. There are a few things I’d like to see though. Specifically, I’d love to be able to access Wordrank/KEI data through the API. The other downside is one it shares with all keyword research tools; succeptability to data poisoning. But they seem to have an Ok defense against that. Whatever. As I grow more experienced in it, I’ll be sure to add more downsides here.

Not Signed up Yet? the 30 day trial only lasts until the 14th, so sign-up and get 30 Days of WordZe for free. It’s a damn good investment. (although I’m not sure a free service can be called an investment?)
Peace Out.
A very exhausted, XMCP

Posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 4:01 pm in the category:Keywords, Product Reviews. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.