Comments on: Keyword Research is a Necessary Suck

By: JJ

JJ — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:27:16 +0000

Thanks! I’ll turn it off and see if I like the results. Hurry up and write another post : )

By: Splork

Splork — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:25:12 +0000

Sliver Rose, I don’t blame you for forgoing the keyword tools. I tend to use them anymore as a starting point. Then I use the Analytics to see what is actually working and keep building on those. It’s not a perfect deal but it’s what I have to work with. My best performing website over the last 4 years was from a site a built without regard t keywords.

By: Dave@Olive Articles

Dave@Olive Articles — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:23:16 +0000

Time and again it seems to be my own content that gives the best keywords, just as you infer. Get the links and the keywords start populating the stats.

Stuff that (if I look) gives a big fat zero in research tools yet actually gives loads of traffic.

I am also finding wordtracker much more reliable than the google tool.

By: Splork

Splork — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:58:12 +0000

Hey JJ. Thanks for reading. I think it has to do with the synonym tool. MFN may add new variations but I don’t think it cheat you out of what the Google tool gives you directly.

By: Silver Rose

Silver Rose — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:03:25 +0000

I’ve given up using the keyword tools, and now go on hunch. My two biggest successes were down to hunches, where the keyword tools said there was no traffic, but my gut knew there was. And I get a good 4000 hits per month to one of the sites and about 1000 hits per month to the other.

I think the problem is that the keyword tools try to smooth the traffic over the year, giving an average per month. But if you are at the start of a trend, the tools will show no traffic (because they look backwards), and you just have to take your chances and go for it. Because everyone else is looking at the keyword tools and holding back, you get an early mover advantage that really pays off.

A lot of this is about making your own luck.

By: JJ

JJ — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:21:49 +0000

Ditto as usual. You have a profound way of stating the obvious. I’m beginning to really like you. You make me feel better about all of this.

A few weeks ago I started doing a little trick with bulk registration to make things faster. I know other people have done this , but I thought I was clever when I thought of it.

Since it is better to get the exact keywords in the url I would go to Google Keyword Tool and find a batch. Then I would copy and paste the list in GoDaddy’s bulk registration tool. Really quickly I found all of the available “exact domains” for that niche. Then I bought MNF and it does all that for me. Just slower.

One question I have about MNF. How does it find its keywords. It seems to be different from the Google Keyword Tool. There’s always these funky variations of the seed word. Most of the time the keywords are not related at all and sometimes they are better.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:10:54 +0000

So in theory one could spend a lot less time chasing links and a lot more time just trying to create massive massive amounts of content, and go for long tail niche volume just by having massive amounts of content. Sort of what forums kind of do, except the posts in forums are often low quality, and short. But combining them together say 20-100 posts to a page… eh, it always comes back to lots of work, some of it drudgery. darn.