Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool

Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing) is the most popular pay per click search engine.  Its Search Term Suggestion Tool is used by bidders to research what search terms (keywords) are the most popular.  Popular keywords will command higher bids.

For Do-It-Yourself search engine optimizers, this tool is an invaluable free resource to select keywords for their pages.  Although the tool only shows you information on searches conducted in Overture and only for a specific period of time (usually a month), it gives you a very good idea of which keywords will be popular and which ones won't in other search engines as well.

The Search Term Suggestion Tool also shows you which variations of the original keywords are also popular.  For example, let's suppose you operate the website of a soccer training camp and you want to optimize your home page for the search term "soccer training".  This is what you obtain after typing "soccer training" in Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool:

As you see, "soccer training" is an extremely competitive keyphrase, and you are likely to face stiff competition to achieve a top position in search engines by trying to optimize your page for those keywords.  In fact, go to Google, do a query for "soccer training" (within quotation marks) and see how many pages come up (quite a few, doesn't it?  I get more than 30,000 pages ...).  Those are all the pages you'll have to beat to achieve a top position.

Your best bet is to go through the list and select a more specific keyphrase, for example "soccer training camp", which is less competitive but still a popular search term.  The more specific you get, the less competition you will have, and the easier it will be for you to optimize your pages for a top position.   Doing the same excercise in Google, I get 632 pages.  Much easier than trying to beat 30,000+ pages for "soccer training" isn't it?  After this example, you probably begin to see how Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool can help you optimize your pages.

You can go further and pick some other variations and use them to create and optimize interior pages of your site:  for example, you can create a page on "soccer training tips", or "kids soccer training", or "women soccer training", now that you know that those are terms that people search for.   Furthermore, if you click on these search term variations in the actual table displayed in Overture, you may get even more specific keyphrases, and consequently get more ideas for additional interior pages that you can set up and easily optimize.

Once traffic starts flowing to these interior pages, it will be up to the navigational aids you set up in those pages to deliver that traffic to your homepage and to other pages on your site.  That is why we recommend to take great care to optimize your homepage, but that you excercise the same attention to detail for your interior pages.

Having said this, I will let you try Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool by yourself.  Go to:  Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool .

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