Wordtracker sells keyword research software on a subscription basis, but the Academy is free. It covers some crucial topics for keyword research, including:

Long tail keywords. The “long tail of search” has been a hot topic lately–it goes along with the idea that marketing to a small but profitable niche can be more lucrative than going after larger markets. This article talks about the reasons why you should target longer key phrases–the more specific, the better.

Behavioral research. This goes beyond strong keyword research and delves into the mystery of what a customer actually wants when they’re searching for a certain word or phrase–and how to profit from behavioral trends among demographic groups.

When keywords fail. What happens when your perfectly-targeted keywords don’t bring the results you expect? What can go wrong, why you might be sabotaging your own sales efforts, and how to better convert visitors into buyers.

Choosing keywords before they’re popular. It would be great to optimize a page on your website for a phrase before it’s popular–it’s easy work and not much competition. Then when the keyword becomes popular, your website will be at the top of the SERPs for all that traffic. Nobody can know the future, unfortunately–but there are a few ways you can pick up on trends before they happen. This article discusses ways to determine which keywords may skyrocket in popularity–before they do.

Keywords in anchor text. How to optimize your anchor text; control the text of external links pointing to your site; the value of optimizing your title tags; and how to make your links more appealing to visitors.

Lots of SEO’s are enthusiastic about Wordtracker. But even if you don’t want to spring for the price, the Academy is worth a look. There are free keyword research tools over at SEOBook, Overture, Webmaster Toolkit, The Dowser, Google’s Keyword Sandbox, and KwMap.

The Google Bigdaddy update is not an algorithm update but an infrastructure update according to Matt’s January 4th blog post where he posted “…new infrastructure at the Bigdaddy data center will let us tackle canonicalization, dupes, and redirects in a much better way going forward compared to the current Google infrastructure.”

On the same date Cutt’s did a post titled Bigdaddy Data Center where he did some question and answers.

Brett and WMW normally name updates. But this is neither an update nor a data refresh; this is new infrastructure…

It has some new infrastructure, not just better algorithms or different data. Most of the changes are under the hood, enough so that an average user might not even notice any difference in this iteration…

And the changes on Bigdaddy are relatively subtle (less ranking changes and more infrastructure changes). Most of the changes are under the hood, and this infrastructure prepares the framework for future improvements throughout the year.

The lastest update on Bigdaddy was the 1st of February where he offers a time table for datacenter conversions.

Remember that Bigdaddy involves new infrastructure and is not just a data push or algorithm update. Don’t take it as a promise, but I’d expect a new data center to be converted to Bigdaddy roughly every 10 days or so.

I also picked up a programmer on contract with the deal also. Andrey from Ukraine has done a good job on this Website and we have had a number of good talks already and I look forward to working with him to expand the project.

Basically the idea is to take the CheckRankings and merge my Keyword Ranking Monitor Tool mock up into it.

Here is my vision for the tool.

Product a quality free tool that will to track and display daily rankings, inbound links, and number of documents in index for Google, Yahoo and MSN. Track and display daily Alexa 3 month ranking, visits, and unique’s of the site, and visits to the pages that are ranking for the keywords. Also to provide the same to SEO Firms who will be able to repackage the tool and place it on their own site and provide this same service to their clients.

I have budgeted $10,000 to develop and market the Keyword Position Tracker tool for 2006.

So there is going to be a number of changes right off the bat. Here is the list that I have given Andrey the programmer.

1. Remove support for Alltheweb, Altavista, AOL, Average, and Teoma.
2. Turn the graph right site up so 1 is at the top.
3. Make the graph default to be last 30 days not the last 7 days.
4. Show a sample output from the Keyword Suggestion & Research Tool.
5. Record number of documents, number of inbound links and Alexa’s 3 month ranking for each domain.
6. Set up a sample ranking that can be viewed so visitors can see a sample of what the Keyword Position Tracker can do for them.
7. Set up a Wordpress blog on the site so the developments of the tool can be blogged and the visitors and users can make comments.

Other longer term plans will be as follows.

1. Get a db admin expert to check the structure of the db.
2. Move the site from to the hosting account it is on now to a server.
3. Change the graph display to a Java applet. (The keywords will be placed down the side and the Java applet will be to the right of that list. You mouse over the keywords and the applet will display a quality graph.)
4. Set up the Keyword Position Tracker app to display rankings on remote pages and offer tool to SEO Firms for them to repackage and offer to their clients.
5. Increase the free account storage to 12 months and leave it at 10 keywords and increase the paid account to 24 months storage, change the payment structure according to the number of keywords and offer remote display.

While that is all happening and things are getting started I have another RAC programmer from Romainia working on the frontend mockup. Their are two reasons I am having the frontend mockup done at the same time. One is for brain storming reasons and the other is I need the visual stimulant to fuel my drive to keep this project on track.

This tool is all about display anyway. There are lots of tools out there that will scrape the SERP or connect to the search engines API and give you results, it’s just the way they display them.

I want the KRMT to be simple and easy to quickly give a non-SEO type a quick view of the over all picture. I want the viewer to be able to look at the blacklinks, pages in index, alexa, site traffic, and 20 keywords in less than 5 mins. At the same time I want them to get a good picture of what is happening.

Lets say Joe Public over 3 months spends $9000 on 200 directory submissions, 30 article writes and submissions to article sites, 6 press releases, and 20 text link ads on relevant home pages. He wants to be able to watch a number of things.

His over all traffic in uniques visits, number of visits and the number of pages viewed. A quick mouseover the Site Traffic link that he can see that.

He wants to be able to watch and see what kind of an increase he gets in inbound links and if the percent of his site pages in the index increases. Mouseover over the Backlinks and Pages in Index and it is all right there.

He then wants to be able to quickly track the differnet sets of keywords that where targeted to show how they go up in the search engine results position for Google, Yahoo and MSN. With KRMT you can mouse over 30 keywords in 3 minutes and get a good grasp of how each keyword is doing.

The frontend programmer is working on version 0.50 as we speak. Version 0.50 will show an area graph in the background of each keywork graph for the number of visits to the page that is ranking for that keyword. That means as your ranking goes up (or down) you will be able to watch the change in traffic for that page quick and easy.

I have some other front end features that I am considering and will post them later. I am looking at being able to mouse over a cell in the grid and have the line number popup. We are currently considering Java or Flash to do that.

Version 0.6 or 0.7 I will decide on what language we are going to use for the frontend and at the same time release the RSS feed with the XML to XHTML convertor. You will just do an include statement of the XML to XTHML convertor in a site template file and poof the graphs will be on yoru own site.

This will make things nice for SEO firms that will want to repackage this tool and provide it to there clients.

Here are the August 2005 numbers from Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool.

• 6411 keyword ranking
• 410 keyword ranking report
• 221 engine keyword ranking search
• 209 search engine research keyword ranking
• 151 keyword ranking tool
• 139 keyword improve my search engine ranking
• 83 engine find keyword ranking search
• 75 keyword ranking service
• 70 engine keyword multiple ranking search tool
• 63 monitor keyword ranking

I have put together a new spec and put it out to tender and am just going to move ahead and get it all done at once. Here are some of the features I will be adding.

1. Set up mouse over code on keywords so that the image is not changed on mouse off.
2. Setup image maps so the when you mouse over the graph lines the cell data is displayed. See sample of line graph mouse overs (hover over the blue, orange and purple dots on the graph).
3. Create a PHP conversion file that will take the RSS feed and re-create the same page on an external Website. This will be written in PHP and be able to be added with an include statement.
4. The default page will show 1 month. Setup the main page with a 7 day, 1 month, 2 month, 3 month, 6 month, 12 month button that will reload the page and preload the graphs for that time period.
5. Add links above the keyworks for for backlinks in Google, Yahaoo, MSN; Number of documents in the index of Google, Yahoo, MSN; and Alexa 3 Month Ranking.
6. Setup the ability to ftp into the clients website and pull their logs and show visits, unique visitors, and page views on another link above the keyword links.

I have been looking at dedicated servers as I am going to need one for this project. Managed.com has some pretty nice looking deals. Their Dedicated Intel Servers page shows a nice $109.95 package with a P4 2.8Ghz, 1GB DDRAM, 120GB EIDE, 1TB BW, no setup fees and no contract. Of course they want another $20 for Cpanel so that takes it to $130. Doesn’t seem to bad of a deal to me.
I have programmers working on another project of about 20 to 40 SEO tools so I am going to need this server anyway.

With JpGraph we have way more features and the speed of the image flip will improve.

We are going to drop the G | Y | M graphs and move the keywords to the left of the graph.

I will be adding a backlinks, document in indexes, Alexa ranking, and a traffic button also. The display will be rounded out with data on DMOZ and Yahoo directories at the top. Also the backend has to be coded to hold all this data and the data will for now be added by hand.

Once the display is done and up to snuff the database expert will work with the programmer to create an optimized structure for the database. Remember I am dreaming about a mimimum of over 250 millions ranking numers with in one year (hey it doesn’t hurt to dream).

After that things will get a little harder. We will need to create code to retrieve the data and a slick and easy backend for the clients to add up an account, their domains and the keywords.

Well it’s been simple so far but I think things are about to change. Stay tune and check out the new display tomorrow. The coder will be working 2pm – 6pm EDT (GMT-5) and I will be posting the live page URL he will be working on so you can tune in if you like and watch the work progress [edit: didn't happen, we discussed the project instead and will be going ahead and doing the whole app in one shot instead of piece meal].

Oh yes, the RSS feed. Well seeing how we are changing the display code I didn’t see any reason to go ahead and do the RSS feed today. That is still in the works thought and will be coming down the pike shortly. My idea is to get the dislay working and hand add the data for the demo keywords. Then while every one is wooing and wowing we will be doing the backend so the thing will work.

Did some one say time to contact a database design engineer? Well I have run off to RAC and am fish’n for a database engineer.

Right now we are using PHP GD to take the data from the mySQL database and create JPG images and preloading them. When you mouse over one of the keywords it is just displaying a preloaded graph image in the same place the blank image is.

Yes I know that’s lame but like I said this is just a mockup not the end product. I am still waiting to find someone in the know that can give me some consulting time and tell me the best way to do this. Until then we will blindly stumble forward.

I like the concept that we have come up with as far as the display. I don’t like the lay but I will be brain storming on that one.

Stay tune – tomorrow it’s the RSS feed and the XML to XHTML converter. Then we will have this thing displaying on an external site.

You mouse over the keyword and scraped data in a mySQL db will be accessed and fill the graph. Three line plots will show the keyword ranking data for Google, Yahoo and MSN. Simple Display eh? But hey that is what people need something very simple.

I revised my RAC Job and reposted and I should have a mock up to show in 4 or 5 days.