SEO/SEM News

Wordtracker is one of the popular keyword research tools you can use on the Internet. It’s relatively cheap and robust enough to do basic keyword research that can help many websites that are not really in super highly competitive markets. People that are really saving on their expenses sometimes just rely on the free Overture tool. But sometimes relying only on one source will not really get you a good picture of the daily searches. But Wordtracker decided to offer a free tool as well. So taking out all the bells and whistles, synonyms and other organization effectsion, Wordtracker came up with it’s free keyword research tool here:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Probably to battle with other free tools, and entice people to use it to get the paid version that has a lot more features. Now one of my officemates mentioned he will incorporate the Wordtracker results in his own web-based tools. And I just tried that right now, it was working for a few tries as I was able to extract keywords. But after some tries, it was not working. And I kept refreshing the page and looking for syntax errors in my PHP code and everything seem to be fine, but no keywords were pulled out. I modified the code to simply make the page appear and there was the problem. The free tool has CAPTCHA also. So no scraping Wordtracker. I guess you can either, (1) detect the CAPTCHA if it exist and display it, and ask for user input also; or (2) use their API which requires you to be a subscriber and I believe also some approval to use the API.

As I was checking the curent rankings for the keywords: search marketing specialist on Google, I noticed something on this page for the sponsored results, one of the PPC ads had no title. My initial reaction was: “How stupid is that?”

I tried to click on the ad just once, and it did not work, I tried it again just because it did not work, and still it did not work. The ad actually does not work! No title, no clickable text. Although my initial reaction was saying “how stupid is that?” I started to think it looks like a smart idea as well. There are many companies that still gets sales done over the phone. It is that human aspect of verbal conversations that can close the deal. And since it only had this description:

Internet Marketing Leader. Est 1998
Call for Free Analysis 800-218-1525
www.SoftwareProjects.com

indeed it is not clickable, but hey, it’s callable. And this is a PPC ad and since you you can’t click on it, then they pay for nothing. If telemarketing works best for them, then they get free exposure on the ad without paying since they get no clicks. And as for the URL, there are many people today knowledgeable of copy and paste, if they were really intrigued in visiting the site, the would really do a copy and paste of the URL and just place it in the address bar of the browser. This can even add as an extra qualification of interest since the potential client really went through the extra effort of doing a copy and paste as they are really wanting to visit the site. Although I thought the idea was stupid at first, now I think it was clever. But what we don’t know is what is Google’s reaction on this? I actually thought Google would not allow blank titles in PPC ads and I am still quite unsure how this was done. So what do you think? Stupid or smart idea?

I believe it was just last week when I used the Overture Keyword Bidding Tool, and today, it’s gone. It has alwasy been useful for SEM professionals to use this tool to check the current bids on a keyword to get a good estimate on how much a certain ad campaign may cost and gets you prepare to come up with a targetted budget. These used to be on:

http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/

or

http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/USm/search/tools/bidtool/

But today, both URLs will give you this message:

Gone
The requested resource
/d/search/tools/bidtool/
is no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource.
Apache/1.3.34 Server at astatine Port 8070

The HTTP status code on this is an Error 410. Unlike an Error 404 that tells you a page is missing, an Error 410 is really telling you the page was deliberately removed and no longer exist. Has the keyword bidding tool moved to a new URL? If yes, why not do a 301 instead? If not, I guess they are only making this available to current people with accounts on Yahoo Search Marketing and will just have the tool available to people with actual active campaigns.