Adding keywords to your initial project list

To use Wordtracker to find more words that might be appropriate, follow
these steps:
1. Click the Home button in the navigation bar at the top of any Wordtracker page to go to the Wordtracker home page.
2. Click the Keyword Universe link. You see the page shown in Figure 4-5.
3. Type the first keyword in your list into the box on the left and then click the Proceed button.
Both the Lateral and Thesaurus check boxes are selected by default.
Here’s the lowdown on these options:
• Lateral: Wordtracker looks for 200 Web sites it thinks are related to the word you typed, and grabs keywords from their KEYWORDS meta tags. (You find out more about the KEYWORDS meta tags in Chapter 6.)
• Thesaurus: Wordtracker looks up the word in a thesaurus.
After clicking the Proceed button, wait a few minutes while Wordtracker builds a list. Then scroll down the left frame to see the list.
4. Click a word in the list in the left frame to load the corresponding table in the right frame.
The table shows you actual searches from the Wordtracker database containing the word you clicked, and other keyword phrases containing that word. So, for instance, if you click rodent, you see search terms such as rodents, rodent control, rodents revenge, rodent, rodent repellent, rodent pictures, and so on.

Next to each term in the table, you see two numbers:
_ Count: The number of times Wordtracker found the search term in its database. The database contains searches for 60 days — more than 310 million of them. So the count is the number of times the term was used in the last two months in the search engines from which Wordtracker builds its database.
_ Predict: An estimate of how many times this term is likely to be used each day, in all the Internet search engines combined.
Wordtracker simply extrapolates from the count number to arrive at the predict number. Wordtracker assumes that the search engines it’s working with account for a certain percentage of all searches, so it simply takes the count number and multiplies accordingly.
I believe these numbers are too low. From what I’ve seen and heard, these terms may actually be searched for 50 to 100 percent more often than the predict number. However, what counts is the relative, rather than absolute, number. If one phrase has a predict value of 12,000 times a day, and another one 6,000 times a day, the actual numbers may be 24,000 and 12,000, but what really matters is that one is much more than the other.
Here’s what you can do with the list of search terms in the right frame:
_ Click the Click Here to Add All Keywords to Your Basket link to add all the keyword phrases to your project. (The number next to the basket in the bottom frame increases as you add phrases to the project.)
_ Click a term to add just that term to the project.
_ Click the shovel icon in the Dig column to see similar terms. Click the shovel in the rodents revenge row, for example, to see a smaller list containing download rodents revenge, rodents revenge download, download rodents revenge game, and so on.

Should you add all the words in the list at once, or one by one? That depends. If the list contains mostly words that seem to you to be relevant keywords, click the All link at the top to add them all — you can remove the few that are no good later. If most of the list seems to be garbage, scroll down the list and add only the useful words.

After you’ve finished tweaking the list, here are a couple of other things you can do:
_ Click another keyword phrase in the left frame to load a new list in the right frame with search terms related to that phrase.
_ Type another word from your original list into the box at the top of the left frame. Wordtracker then retrieves more terms related to it from the thesaurus and KEYWORDS meta tags.
_ Type a term into the text box at the top of the right frame and click the Go button to create a list based on that term.

The left frame is handy because it runs your words through a thesaurus and grabs words from KEYWORD meta tags. But I also like to use the text box at the top of the right frame: I grab a few keyword phrases from my list and copy them into the box (each one needs to be on a separate line). This is a quick way to find matching phrases for the terms already in your list. Typing a word into the text box at the top of the right frame is the same thing as clicking a word in the left frame — Wordtracker looks for real search phrases that include the word. Type (or paste) multiple words into that text box, and
Wordtracker looks for matches for each of those words.