Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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It’s sometimes hard to find the URL for this tool. Start from the YSM Resource

Center homepage,

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch

, and look for a link

labeled Keyword Selector Tool. If you don’t find it there, or if the URL has changed,

you can always find the current link on our companion website at

www.yourseoplan.com

There are two nice things about the YSM tool: it’s free, and it’s simple. All you

do to use it is enter a keyword phrase. Up will pop a list of related terms along with

your original term and the number of searches that took place throughout the YSM

network over the course of a month (the data is usually a couple of months old). How-

ever, YSM has many fewer features than Wordtracker, and because it uses PPC data, it

combines terms that may not be combined by nonpaid engines. For example, YSM sees

the words

clothes

and

clothing

as being the same—this is called

stemming

—while any

organic search engine would not. It also does some funky things with alphabetization.

So for example, if you search for the term “send in the clowns,” YSM will return infor-

mation about the term “clown in send sinatra the,” with all the words in alphabetical

order. See Figure 6.3 for an example.

Now, you’re a smart one, and it won’t take long before you can see that a term

like “clown in send sinatra the” is so ludicrously unlike the English language that

nobody is really searching for it in that order. Stemming and alphabetization limit the

usefulness of the YSM tool, but it’s still a great way to spot popularity trends.

Figure 6.3

Ya hoo! ke y word

data for “send in the clowns”

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